# Adam Grant - The Potential of Your Potential

An episode of [The Imperfects](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1476501557), 10 Mar 2024, 1 h 31 min.

Audio: https://enrichment.soundstack.com/4vjqq8/episode.flightcast.com/mohia8bc41yumralr2wxqldu.mp3

World leading organisational psychologists, Adam Grant is this week's guest in The Academy of Imperfection and honestly, we can’t believe how much ground the brilliant man managed to cover in this episode. I mean, sure, you might expect him to touch on the value of embracing our imperfections. Or perhaps he might explore imposter syndrome & the importance in believing in others' belief in yourself. Or how procrastination can actually be a creative force. Or maybe even some tips for those of us who have found ourselves languishing. All of this might seem pretty reasonable stuff to cover. However you might not expect a deep dive into the lessons learned from a junior olympic diving career or an actual magic trick! This ep covers it all…and much much more. To watch this episode on youtube (and see the magic trick) follow this link: https://youtu.be/s2sY3-mT-u8 If you’re interested in hearing more from Adam, the best place to start is his website: https://adamgrant.net Recommended books & articles mentioned in the episode: • Hidden Potential, The Science of Achieving Greater Things, by Adam Grant: https://bit.ly/3wBynWW • Give and Take, A Revolutionary Approach to Success, by Adam Grant: https://bit.ly/3TrKwqI • Creativity Inc: Overcoming Unseen Forces That Stand In The Way of True Inspiration, by Ed Catmull: https://bit.ly/49ZgNur • Born Standing Up: A Comics Life, by Steve Martin: https://bit.ly/3TnZTjK • It’s Called Languishing (article) by Adam Grant https://nyti.ms/48J86Uf Listen to Adam’s interview with Steve Martin on his ReThinking Podcast: https://bit.ly/3Tosvtb and transcript: https://bit.ly/3T3cKXa To watch Matthew Mitcham’s dive, follow think link: https://bit.ly/3InmPJJ To listen to our episode with Dr Emily on Truth vs Harmony, follow this link: https://apple.co/40pgYO7 See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

## Transcript

[0:00] My name's Josh.
[0:01] I'm a co-host on The Imperfects and the son of Sri Lankan and English immigrants, and I call Australia home.
[0:06] I'd like to recognise the traditional peoples of this continent whose land was stolen nearly 250 years ago.
[0:11] In particular, we at The Imperfects would like to acknowledge the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation as the traditional owners of the land on which this podcast was recorded, and we extend our respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.
[0:22] I'm inspired by the world's oldest living culture, and we at The Imperfects
[0:31] Hello and welcome to the Academy of Imperfection, where experts in their field share their wisdom on the subject of imperfection.
[0:43] Today, our lecturer is Adam Grant, best-selling American author and organizational psychologist to talk all about your hidden potential.
[0:56] The big question that comes out of this is what do you do with the feeling of being an imposter?
[1:00] It's really tempting to trust your own judgment over other people's because you have more information about yourself than any other person will ever have about you.
[1:07] What you're forgetting is that other people see you more objectively.
[1:10] And I think what that means is if multiple people believe in you, it's probably time to believe them.
[1:16] So ink your quills and get ready for Adam Grant in the Academy of Imperfection.
[1:27] Isn't it great to be back in the academy, our favourite academy, the Academy of Interfection?
[1:32] Oh, it's so nice to be in here.
[1:35] I feel like I'm ready to learn, ready to hang out with my schoolmates, meet today's lecturer.
[1:41] A real-life lecturer?
[1:42] Yeah, always.
[1:44] Well, yeah, I mean, not to discredit our other lecturers who have been here, but this is a...
[1:49] This is, I mean, I'm going to skip through.
[1:50] It's safe to say all our lecturers have been real life lecturers.
[1:53] But not if this, like this is, we have, we have.
[1:58] I have no idea where you're going with this.
[1:59] We have Adam Grant here.
[2:00] Oh, we have Adam Grant here.
[2:01] Yeah.
[2:02] Yeah.
[2:02] More real life than normal people?
[2:04] Yeah.
[2:05] In the lecturing world, yes.
[2:06] Yep.
[2:06] Great.
[2:07] Yeah.
[2:07] Love it.
[2:08] We'll stop arguing about it now.
[2:09] It's a good start arguing with each other.
[2:11] Lecturer sounds so boring.
[2:13] Yeah.
[2:14] That's the last thing I ever want.
[2:16] If I found out somebody was a lecturer, I would immediately ask to change seats on a flight.
[2:19] Okay.
[2:20] Yes.
[2:20] I do not want to be lectured.
[2:22] Yeah.
[2:22] What would you prefer to be called?
[2:24] I don't know.
[2:25] Not that.
[2:26] Person.
[2:27] Organizational psychologist.
[2:28] Oh, nice.
[2:29] Which usually leads to a, what's that?
[2:32] organisational psychologist yeah I mean my interpretation of that only knowing a bit of your background is more like a psychologist obviously but one in terms of like how to organise your life and how to is that fair enough well put great phew yeah
[2:48] God, A for me so far.
[2:49] Would you like me to read out some things about Adam?
[2:52] Yes.
[2:53] I mean, I think everyone listening will know who Adam is, but suffice to say we are absolutely thrilled to have you here.
[2:59] It is just very, very exciting for us.
[3:01] Adam has devoted his career to the study of motivation.
[3:05] He has six number one New York Times bestselling books.
[3:09] Wow.
[3:10] I know.
[3:13] Now, your new book, Hidden Potential, is that one of those six?
[3:16] Apparently.
[3:16] Okay.
[3:17] Apparently.
[3:18] She was.
[3:18] The book Hidden Potential, The Science of Achieving Greater Things.
[3:21] We will talk about that because that I find fascinating.
[3:24] You are the top-rated professor at the Wharton Business School at the University of Pennsylvania for the past seven years straight.
[3:29] Is that a thing where they just –
[3:31] get you to stand in order of wisdom.
[3:33] Like, how does that work?
[3:35] What's happening there?
[3:36] I don't know.
[3:37] They do something with student course evaluations and then you get an email at the end of the year saying congratulations.
[3:42] Is there a function?
[3:43] Do you?
[3:44] No.
[3:45] And I think they discontinued the award.
[3:47] Oh, okay.
[3:48] Got it.
[3:49] I think it was after you won it seven years in a row.
[3:51] This is getting...
[3:52] I don't know what happened.
[3:53] They could just rename it the Adam Grant Award.
[3:55] That sounds terrible.
[3:56] I wouldn't wish that on anyone.
[3:59] So Adam has consulted for organizations like Facebook, Google, United Nations on topics such as generosity, diversity, collaboration.
[4:08] You are also a junior Olympic springboard diver, is that right?
[4:13] So is there a junior Olympics or when you're in the Olympics, you are quite junior?
[4:18] No, I qualified for, I guess, the junior Olympic nationals a couple of times and kind of peaked there.
[4:24] Never had a shot at the real Olympics.
[4:26] Yeah.
[4:26] okay is that was that a low diving board or a high one it was one meter and three meter springboard that was not insane enough to do platform right what was your best move is the wrong word dive what was your best dive uh my favorite dive was a full twisting two and a half on three meters so you do two flips a 360 turn and then dive in head first
[4:45] Oh my gosh.
[4:46] Wow.
[4:47] You could do some crazy stuff turning up to like a public pool and just getting off on the diving board and just really shocking people.
[4:52] Yeah.
[4:52] And that lasts for about five minutes.
[4:55] Wow.
[4:55] I'm retired for a reason.
[4:56] Sorry.
[4:57] Was that a huge part?
[4:58] I mean, that must've been a big part of your life for a little while.
[5:01] Just diving was just everything.
[5:02] I was obsessed for at least six years.
[5:05] What is it about diving that you loved?
[5:08] At first I was just mesmerized seeing, I, I, I love sports.
[5:13] I wasn't very good at any of them.
[5:15] And after failing at basketball and at football, my mom dragged me to a local pool and I saw a lifeguard who was on break.
[5:22] It turned out he was a state finalist and I just watched him, the power and the control where he could spin crazy fast and then disappear into the water without a splash.
[5:32] I just wanted to learn how to do it.
[5:34] Um,
[5:35] I was afraid of heights.
[5:36] I also couldn't touch my toes without bending my knees.
[5:40] I got called Frankenstein.
[5:42] But what I came to love about it is every single thing that happens in diving is entirely under your control.
[5:48] It's all on you.
[5:49] And so every single day I could work to get better.
[5:52] Yeah, I love that.
[5:53] That's really good.
[5:54] It's interesting.
[5:55] It's actually an interesting, is there a correlation there between like wanting to learn how to control something?
[6:00] And then I feel like in life, we're often trying to, like so much of what you do is about kind of like control the uncontrollable, which is maybe impossible, but doing your best.
[6:09] Sort of the obsession with that is kind of interesting.
[6:12] I feel like this could be a therapy session.
[6:15] And you're on to something there, Ryan, because I love the focus of your show because I was a perfectionist.
[6:23] I'm in recovery now.
[6:25] And I thought that was going to be a huge advantage in diving because you're aiming for perfect tens.
[6:31] And it was actually a massive liability and really held back my career for –
[6:36] at least my first year, maybe two.
[6:38] And my coach taught me to embrace imperfections.
[6:41] And that was a big part of my growth as a diver.
[6:43] Gosh, how do you embrace imperfections when the aim is a perfect 10?
[6:47] Okay.
[6:47] So this is, this is the first conversation we had about it.
[6:49] So my coach, Eric Best sent me down one day and he said, you got to stop being such a perfectionist.
[6:55] But I want perfect tens.
[6:56] And he said, there's no such thing.
[6:59] What do you mean?
[6:59] Are Olympic announcers lying to us?
[7:02] I've seen the tens.
[7:03] I've seen them.
[7:04] But they're not perfect.
[7:05] Look at the rule book.
[7:06] A ten is for excellent, not for perfection.
[7:08] Oh, wow.
[7:09] So even if you take an Aussie diver like Matthew Mitchum, who won a gold medal on platform,
[7:15] He did, I think, the second highest scoring dive in history.
[7:19] And if you watch it, you can probably find a dozen flaws in it.
[7:22] Oh, wow.
[7:23] It's just excellent and better than almost anyone has done any dive ever.
[7:28] And so Eric sat me down and he said, listen, what we need to do is we need to stop being so perfectionistic because what was happening to me was you start your approach down the board and you're supposed to just go and do your dive.
[7:40] But for me, if I was a little off balance, the dive is already ruined.
[7:43] So I would stop and I would start over.
[7:45] I'd waste half a practice not actually diving just because I couldn't get my balance right.
[7:50] And then I'd want to perfect every dive.
[7:52] And so I'd work on my easiest dive that was already pretty good, like a basic front dive.
[7:56] And I'd want to do 30 of those before I moved on.
[7:58] And Eric said, you've got to be willing to make mistakes.
[8:02] You have to try things that are harder so we can raise your degree of difficulty.
[8:05] And eventually where that landed was, he would tell me, he would say, Adam, make it feel wrong.
[8:12] I don't want it to feel wrong.
[8:13] He's like, in order to get it right, you have to make it feel wrong because every time I tell you to make a change, you undercorrect because you don't want to mess up what's already working.
[8:20] And you have to overcorrect in order to make a real leap.
[8:25] How old were you in this whole process?
[8:28] I started too late.
[8:28] So I was 13 when I first got interested in diving.
[8:35] I didn't have a real coach until I was 14.
[8:36] And so this was a teenager.
[8:39] Wow.
[8:40] Are you asking because you're thinking about a career in diving?
[8:42] Yeah, I was just wondering because it sounds lovely.
[8:44] No, just because it feels like such a, that speaks to me so much of being a teenager and that I was trying to be perfect the whole time and didn't want to ever be doing anything that would seem like I'm failing.
[8:55] I mean, that's the curse of perfectionism.
[8:56] I didn't know it at the time, but now, I mean, the research in psychology on perfectionism is so clear.
[9:01] Tom Curran and his colleagues, I think, have done the most useful work on this, where they show that if you're a perfectionist, you're more likely to burn out because you're constantly falling short of your own expectations and you end up beating yourself up over and over again, which...
[9:14] Doesn't make you stronger.
[9:15] It just leaves you bruised.
[9:17] And then you're also afraid to try new things and take risks because you might fail.
[9:22] Yeah.
[9:22] So you just stick to the things that are in your comfort zone.
[9:24] And then that, that interferes with your growth.
[9:26] Absolutely.
[9:27] It's really interesting though that we, with the specific to the diving example, because I'm assuming it's the same in gymnastics that when you hear about people talk about, is it Nadia Comaneci, is that the name?
[9:37] Comaneci, yeah.
[9:38] They say perfect tens and it's always linked.
[9:41] It's always a perfect comes before the ten and it's like this obsession with that must be perfect.
[9:45] Yeah.
[9:45] When it's not even the rules.
[9:47] It's a lie.
[9:48] Yeah.
[9:49] So you went from springboard diver to, it might not be as linear as this, but a professional magician.
[9:56] I retired from that.
[9:57] Really?
[9:58] That was a hobby.
[10:01] First, to keep the kids I babysat for to sit still.
[10:05] They were extremely hyper.
[10:08] They got into magic one day, and I noticed that I didn't have to chase them around the house.
[10:11] I went home and learned a trick, and it was really fun to entertain people.
[10:16] And I realized as a shy introvert, it was a great way to come out of my shell to have something to share and be able to do a little performance.
[10:22] And then I paid for a part of college doing magic shows.
[10:26] Wow.
[10:26] Like close up magic?
[10:28] Yeah, mostly close up.
[10:29] I did a little bit of stage work, but cards were my specialty.
[10:33] Fascinating.
[10:34] Oh, I'd love close.
[10:35] Can you do any of them now?
[10:36] Yeah.
[10:37] I think you have a responsibility to always keep your skills.
[10:40] Really?
[10:41] So someone gave you a pack of cards now.
[10:43] You could do it.
[10:43] Do we have one?
[10:44] I don't know if we do.
[10:45] We have vulnerability house cards.
[10:47] We don't have a deck of cards.
[10:48] What a shame.
[10:49] I can hear people shuffling in the background.
[10:51] Wait, what is that?
[10:52] Oh, they're our tea house.
[10:54] So we have vulnerable questions written on them.
[10:56] I don't know if it'll work.
[10:57] I don't think that'll work.
[10:58] I don't know.
[10:59] Let's see.
[11:00] What are these?
[11:00] So there's different questions written on them.
[11:03] Oh, that's good.
[11:04] I mean, that's a trick in itself.
[11:06] This is the most action that these cards have.
[11:10] Oh!
[11:10] This is not where I expect this to go.
[11:12] I'll try a little.
[11:12] I've never worked with cards like this, but at least you know I didn't bring them.
[11:17] They haven't been doctored.
[11:20] So when I was 12 and I was first learning card tricks, I was wanting to learn how to do that.
[11:25] I thought it looked cool.
[11:26] Only the cards would fly everywhere.
[11:28] It still looks cool.
[11:29] So they'd get all mixed up, upside down, right side up, backward, forward.
[11:34] And eventually I'd collect them all up and I'd find them and I'd find some that were front to back like that.
[11:40] Yeah.
[11:41] Some that were back to front like that.
[11:43] And I'd even find a few that were back to back like this.
[11:46] Eventually, I got tired of flipping every single card.
[11:48] It was really time consuming.
[11:49] And I was like, you know what?
[11:50] I'll just go like this and the cards will all be fixed.
[12:02] Well, I think I know what we're doing for the next hour.
[12:04] Don't worry about the books.
[12:07] Go to YouTube.
[12:09] You need to see that link in the show notes.
[12:12] One of the things that was really fun about magic, though, and this happened right during the diving, like in the middle of my diving career,
[12:18] is every once in a while a trick would go wrong in a show and I'd have to accept that there was a flaw and it felt like a failure, but then it's like, okay, can I salvage it?
[12:30] And I think that was a good push.
[12:32] To adapt.
[12:33] Yeah.
[12:33] Yeah, a friend of mine's a magician, Magic Mike.
[12:36] Not a stripper.
[12:37] He is a...
[12:38] a minute he's talking to me about that about like how having to adapt mid-trick you know if something doesn't go to plan and you have to improvise like that's even more impressive but unfortunately the audience don't know that you've improvised no you don't get credit for it yeah it's only if you're if you have a fellow magician in the audience then they'll uh they'll probably appreciate it but otherwise it's lost
[13:01] I'm going to review that footage with Magic Mike and see if he can explain what on earth just happened then.
[13:06] I'm sure he'll know.
[13:07] That is extraordinary.
[13:08] I mean, I can't believe you're here.
[13:09] I feel like sitting down with you here, Adam, I feel a little bit like when you decide to go on YouTube and you get onto YouTube and you go...
[13:17] Where do I start?
[13:18] I don't even know where to begin here.
[13:20] The topics that we could go through with you, I've just got a couple down here, but procrastination, languishing, creativity, imposter syndrome, mobile phone usage for kids, generosity, compassion, all these things that you're a thought leader on a global scale and people tune into you all over the world.
[13:36] Interesting you say you're a shy introvert or you describe yourself as a shy introvert, yet you are the person that people go to to communicate this stuff to them.
[13:43] Yeah, I think I'm less shy now, but introversion hasn't really changed.
[13:47] Yeah.
[13:47] Okay.
[13:48] And I think the easiest sign of that is I feel...
[13:53] Well, so often, I'll be really happy to get on stage or to have a conversation with people.
[14:01] And at some point, I just feel extremely overstimulated.
[14:05] And I think there's a misunderstanding of introversion, extroversion.
[14:08] Most people think it's about where you get your energy, and extroverts are supposed to be energized by other people, and introverts are energized by alone time.
[14:15] That's actually false.
[14:16] We're all energized by other people.
[14:18] The problem is that introverts have a threshold.
[14:21] And once they get over that, they get overloaded.
[14:24] And so then they need to sort of retreat to recharge.
[14:26] And I feel like I'm most me when I'm writing or I'm reading or I'm in a conversation with somebody and I'm happy to do a performance.
[14:36] I'm happy to interact with a group.
[14:38] But it's more of a stretch than my natural comfort zone.
[14:44] Amazing.
[14:46] As far as like topics, I mean, we could start so many places.
[14:49] I would love to start with just hearing the journey you've been on in this last five minutes, I feel like I understand a little bit more maybe why you chose to talk about potential in your latest book perhaps.
[15:00] I'd love to start maybe with potential.
[15:02] That's what I was going to say just for the record.
[15:04] That's what I was going to say.
[15:08] Do you want to finish saying it?
[15:08] You guys are getting a little competitive here.
[15:10] It's all right.
[15:11] No, he's doing really good.
[15:15] So potential, am I right in saying that it spoke to you because of your personal experience with achieving or fulfilling potential?
[15:21] Yeah, I think a lot of people judge their potential by how easily a task comes to them or how natural they are to skill.
[15:30] And if I had judged my potential as a diver, I would have quit based on the fact that I was terrible when I started.
[15:36] I was the worst diver on my team by far.
[15:39] Same thing with teaching and public speaking.
[15:41] Initially, I did not do well, and I could have easily given up.
[15:45] And in both cases, I was really lucky to have coaches who saw my hidden potential and then helped me realize it.
[15:51] And I think that I just I watch so many people count themselves out and write others off because they say, all right, I'm not a natural at this.
[15:59] And therefore, this is not for me.
[16:02] I should just play to my strengths.
[16:04] No.
[16:06] There's so many world-class performers in every field from, if you look at the research, from artists to scientists to musicians to athletes, most of whom did not stand out when they were kids.
[16:19] Their coaches, their early teachers didn't know how great they were going to become.
[16:22] Sometimes their own parents didn't even see their potential.
[16:25] And I just think you can't predict where people are going to land from where they start.
[16:28] And we should not discourage ourselves or others because of that.
[16:33] it's so true i think about that under the lens of a really obvious one because it's so measurable is sport and people that you grow up with who it seemed to come really naturally to them as kids who don't go on to become elite athletes and then other people who are new growing up who were okay they were fine but didn't seem that special but just kind of kept going and kept descending when other people dropped off or stopped and
[16:57] And it's always something kind of joyful for me when I see that, see the person that didn't necessarily stand out really achieving in a field.
[17:06] I think I find it joyful because of my own reflections on feeling like I think many people would have to have underachieved for a lot of my life.
[17:17] So interesting.
[17:18] Yeah, I think it's we all love to work.
[17:20] I mean, at some level, we all love to root for the underdog.
[17:23] But also you feel like that person has really earned it.
[17:26] They didn't start out with a natural advantage.
[17:28] And yet here they are.
[17:30] And you contrast that with I find it so frustrating to watch Nick Kyrgios play tennis because he's clearly the most talented tennis player in the world.
[17:39] And like, OK, if he had a little bit more of the character skills of Roger Federer or, you know, Novak Djokovic or I don't know, I mean, there are probably a number of people who would love to have his natural ability.
[17:52] And I think what you're describing is the opposite of that, which is you see somebody who doesn't quite have that.
[17:57] And here they are anyway.
[17:58] Wow.
[17:59] That's somebody who really who had to they lived in a world where opportunity didn't knock and they had to build a door.
[18:07] Because I think about that in terms like I come from more of a creative background, like in writing and performing.
[18:14] And I often – I get – I'm more –
[18:18] it more irks me when someone gets the opportunity purely from hard work and doesn't have the natural talent.
[18:25] Really?
[18:25] Yeah.
[18:27] I think I, when I, when I see someone or meet someone who is just naturally hilarious or a brilliant pianist or painter or something, it doesn't necessarily matter.
[18:41] Like I'm, I'm not more impressed with them if they've done a lot with it.
[18:45] Whereas if I meet someone who has made a fortune and a career of performing, but I don't particularly think they're very like, well, to put it in your, use your word, original.
[18:58] I'm like, yeah, I mean, hard work is great, but in my mind, it's not original.
[19:04] Hard work is not original.
[19:05] Not everyone can do it, but...
[19:08] a lot of people work hard.
[19:10] And if, and to me, I feel like true creatives are the ones who can, who naturally create something original, um, because that's just how they're wired.
[19:20] So interesting.
[19:21] So you're, you're not actually rooting for the person who's naturally skilled.
[19:26] What you're doing is you're putting a premium on creativity and saying a lot of people use hard work as a substitute for that.
[19:33] Yes, and which is fine, but in terms of the people that I like or that I respond to or respect as an artist are people who have something that's purely original and they might only do it in their own home or YouTube channel that 50 people watch.
[19:52] But to me, I think that's way cooler than the person who is...
[19:57] just who hasn't got anything original about them, but has done really well in their career.
[20:03] I think that's fair.
[20:03] I think it's a little bit of a false dichotomy though, right?
[20:05] Because in a lot of cases, the people whose originality you admire were only able to showcase it because they put in the effort to make it valuable and visible to others.
[20:14] That's true.
[20:15] Yeah.
[20:16] You know, I think about like one of for me, one of the the most well, one of my favorite creatives.
[20:23] And I don't think anybody would call him anything other than an original Steve Martin.
[20:27] And you look at him like, OK, clearly that guy is cut from a different cloth than the rest of us.
[20:32] And yet it's I find him so much more compelling when you realize that he spent his first decade just bombing on stage over and over again.
[20:39] His book is unbelievable.
[20:40] His biography.
[20:41] The Born Standing Up book.
[20:42] Incredible.
[20:43] So good.
[20:44] So I had a chance to interview him on my podcast last year.
[20:47] I mean, first of all, he's he's one of those people who like every single question you ask him.
[20:54] He's capable of coming up with an answer that you never could have thought of.
[20:56] Like, OK, this is a nonlinear, you know, truly original brain.
[21:02] But the fact that he couldn't figure out how to translate whatever strength he had into a show that people wanted to watch for that long, that makes me admire him all the more.
[21:14] Yeah, I guess it's the combination of original and hard worker is the ultimate.
[21:19] But I guess maybe what I'm saying is like, I would prefer original non hard worker than non original hard worker.
[21:27] That's just me.
[21:28] So I'm just thinking about people who are listening right now and the word potential, I mean, trigger is not the right word, but it really speaks to them as far as they're sitting at home now and are worried that they're not living.
[21:39] I have gone through stages when I was, I'm 43 now, but when I was early 30s, all my friends were having kids and they were married and I was single, no kids, and they had these careers.
[21:49] I had no idea what I was going to do with my life.
[21:51] I hadn't established.
[21:52] No, I was trying to start this business called the Resilience Project, but it just wasn't.
[21:55] happening for me back then.
[21:56] And I remember just feeling like I'm not living up to my potential at all.
[21:59] And it's a really confronting and upsetting feeling to sit with.
[22:05] And I just wondered through writing the book, what you've learned about people who are at that stage where they just feel like they're not living up to their potential.
[22:15] It's something I should have spent more time on, frankly, because it's come up a lot.
[22:18] And I think that there's a basic mistake that people make when they think about this.
[22:23] Your potential is not fixed.
[22:25] There's not some preordained level you're supposed to reach in order to feel like you've made the most of your talents.
[22:34] And in fact, your idea of how much potential you have or where it lies is constantly evolving.
[22:39] Yeah.
[22:40] And so I think the whole idea that you've not lived up to your potential is sort of, I guess it's buying into a myth that there's some measure that will tell you, yes, you have.
[22:51] You'll know when you hit it.
[22:52] Yeah, exactly.
[22:53] And by the time you do, the reality is your expectations will have gone up so high that you probably won't appreciate it anyway, right?
[22:58] Because I mean, I think one of the clearest double-edged swords of the human condition is your expectations rise with your accomplishments.
[23:06] So when you succeed at something, you start to expect more of yourself.
[23:10] and most people actually find that their expectations rise faster than their achievements.
[23:15] And that means, on the one hand, you're always motivated because you feel like you're falling short of your aspirations and your potential.
[23:21] On the other hand, you never enjoy your own success.
[23:24] You never feel proud of what you've achieved because you've started to take for granted that you're going to hit that level.
[23:28] And so at some point, you get out of that rat race and you say, okay, okay.
[23:36] What I don't like is the feeling that I'm squandering what I'm capable of and that I could be doing something more valuable and more worthwhile.
[23:44] But it's up to me to decide what that is as opposed to saying these people say this is my potential, but I'm actually doing this and therefore I'm not good enough.
[23:52] I, in thinking about this discussion today, I was sort of thinking about similar experience to Hugh as far as the feeling of not living up to potential.
[24:04] And it occurred to me that I, what had happened for me, which is funny that you were talking about there's a set goal.
[24:09] And for me...
[24:11] It came in the form of a number in that the way that schooling is done here is that you get a – at the end of year 12, you get a score out of 100, maximum score being 99.95 because it's a percentage – Percentile.
[24:23] Percentile of the population.
[24:26] Which the perfectionists are really upset about.
[24:28] So close to 100.
[24:29] Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[24:32] I enjoyed school and for many reasons, complicated ones, but a lot of stuff we were going through in our family at the time, I set the goal of myself to try and be perfect at school.
[24:42] And I did find schoolwork quite enjoyable and the systems of school quite, they worked for me.
[24:48] And I worked hard and I got a number I was really proud of.
[24:51] And then as I went into my 20s and started working, it's like I saw myself originally in this bracket of society that that percentile put me in.
[25:00] And the less I did with my job and the less I did with my career and the more I saw myself drifting away from that number and sort of falling into the abyss.
[25:09] And that was literally like measuring the potential loss as I went through.
[25:14] Wow.
[25:15] Um, even though I was, life was great.
[25:18] Like I had a beautiful partner who I'm still with.
[25:21] I had lived in a nice house.
[25:23] I had a job that was pretty good.
[25:25] It's not the job I have now.
[25:26] And I love this job, but it was a good job.
[25:29] And it was by any measure a successful life, but it just felt like I was drifting away from that number consistently for 10 years.
[25:36] So what happened then?
[25:37] Did you let go of the number?
[25:40] To be honest, I had kids and we started the show and life felt okay.
[25:46] And I was like – and I started to – and the work – the conversations we've been having on the show and the work we've been doing here has sort of repeatedly drilled in the idea that you don't have to be perfect and that this stuff is kind of bullshit.
[25:59] But – and the kids thing put it all into perspective.
[26:02] Yeah.
[26:02] I've sort of said this on the show before, but I had this adjustment, readjustment when I had kids that was like, well, I don't want my kids to have a dad that talks to himself like that.
[26:14] So I need to change this now.
[26:15] Wow.
[26:16] So you decided you wanted to be a better role model.
[26:19] Basically.
[26:19] And I went to a psychologist for a long time to work through a lot of stuff to help get there as well for sort of six years leading up to that.
[26:26] So it was a combination of work, kids and professional help that I think got me to a place, but I'm certainly not there.
[26:33] Like on my, some days I'll feel fine, but you know, like a couple of days a week, probably I still feel like I should be doing better and there's more potential out there and I'm squandering and wasting time and stuff like that.
[26:45] The tyranny of should.
[26:47] Gotta love it.
[26:47] Yeah.
[26:48] I mean, according to who?
[26:51] There's a voice in your head, some kind of internalized expectation that other people had of you.
[26:56] I think the thing that really gets us in trouble is you start to define your worth by your success.
[27:02] And I think the sooner you decouple them and say, you know what?
[27:05] My value as a human being does not depend on how much I achieve, the easier it is to let go of some of those past hauntings.
[27:13] But...
[27:14] It's hard.
[27:14] And I think this comes back to perfectionism a little bit because, you know, Josh, when I hear you talk, I think about the research on perfectionism shows that on average, perfectionists do better in school, but not any better in their jobs than their peers.
[27:30] And, you know, if you think about it in school, it's really easy to figure out what's going to be on a test and then master all the material and be prepared to ace it.
[27:38] And then you get out into a job or a career and it's not so clear cut.
[27:44] I had a really interesting conversation with Chris Nolan, the filmmaker, about this, where he said, you know, the problem is like you spend all this time in school trying to get an A on your paper.
[27:56] And then you get out into the real world and you realize no one's even reading your paper, let alone grading it.
[28:01] And there's no grading rubric.
[28:03] And I think this is the problem is those of us who are used to measuring ourselves by our accomplishments, like you get into a less structured environment.
[28:13] Like, okay, I need to find the rubric.
[28:15] I need to figure out how to know that I'm doing well, that I'm succeeding.
[28:20] And he's going to tell me I'm good.
[28:21] Exactly.
[28:22] And at some point you just stop playing the game and say, like, it no longer makes sense to always measure my success.
[28:27] What I want to ask is, am I, am I involved in things that I think are worthwhile?
[28:32] And that means, you know, I might, I might change my goals.
[28:35] And I want to be clear about what my values are.
[28:37] And, and,
[28:38] I have a lot of conversations with my students about this because they define success so much as achieving their goals and their goals are heavily anchored to what other people think is impressive and important.
[28:47] Like, listen, it's not success to choose a job that impresses other people if it leaves you miserable.
[28:54] So don't get seduced by status.
[28:56] Instead, define success as living your values, not just achieving your goals.
[29:01] I think that that's one way to maybe escape a little bit from this trap of, okay, how am I going to prove myself next?
[29:09] Because I do think when I think of potential, my natural reaction to that is to think from a person, like a work professional career standpoint.
[29:21] But then I sort of, the more I thought about it, I thought, well, and I think you did touch on this in your book a little bit, but,
[29:28] I can't think of a better term for it, but personal potential, as far as your potential as a human being and how you treat people.
[29:41] Maybe this plays a little bit into givers and takers and how you talk about that a bit, because that really fascinates me as well.
[29:49] But as far as potential...
[29:52] On one side of it, of course, there are a lot of people who are motivated and want to achieve a lot.
[29:56] But then I guess there are people who don't necessarily feel the need to achieve a lot at work.
[30:01] They just want to reach their potential as a good person.
[30:05] Yeah, that's a fascinating reframe of this idea because you're right.
[30:09] Most of us think about potential as how good can I get at something?
[30:13] And usually that's a measurable skill and it has to do with some kind of professional accomplishment.
[30:18] Yeah.
[30:19] And I think that, unfortunately, a lot of people, usually around midlife and mid-career, if you look at the data, people start to realize, oh, that's not enough.
[30:29] And it's actually not totally fulfilling to just focus on those things.
[30:34] So what kind of person do I want to become?
[30:37] And I do think in the broadest sense, hidden potential is about having a capacity for growth that,
[30:43] is invisible to you or to other people.
[30:46] And that could exist anywhere.
[30:48] You could have hidden potential to improve as a parent, to be a better partner, to be a better friend, or to be a better human being.
[30:56] And I'd love to see people spend more time on that.
[30:58] I mean, there's so much discussion of how do we build our careers?
[31:03] When are we asking the question of how do we build our character?
[31:06] Well, it can't, I mean, I think about that a lot because I, I naturally do, I'm someone who thinks about how can I be a better writer or how can I be better at my job?
[31:16] And, um, that's just how I, and it's probably also due to the fact that that's often how we're brought up, you know, just within our culture.
[31:25] It's, um, how do you become the best?
[31:27] How do you get to number one?
[31:27] Um, yeah.
[31:29] Another part of what you write about is this givers and takers and this idea of, I guess, being, maybe you don't put it like this, but like being selfless versus being selfish.
[31:42] And like often I find myself, particularly in work environments, I'm so, and often I find it even here, like in a work environment, not on it when we're recording, but even when we're just talking as a team,
[31:55] I find myself so like I prioritize the idea or the project or the outcome with like I'm so laser focused on that.
[32:07] And I feel like an obligation to the idea or the project to make sure it's like the best it can be.
[32:14] And I feel like as a result...
[32:17] I am not taking the needs of the other people in the team into consideration.
[32:22] And so often I feel like afterwards, I've never told you guys this, but often I like walk away from it thinking like, oh, I was really not necessarily, or maybe you could call it selfish, but definitely whether it's self-serving or thinking of the needs of the show or the idea more than the needs or sensitivities of the people that I actually love and work with.
[32:45] Ryan, I'm really sorry.
[32:46] I'm not that kind of psychologist.
[32:49] You guys need a different... No, I think it's...
[32:55] It's something I think about a lot from the perspective of, first of all, let's just be clear.
[33:01] When I think about the spectrum of givers and takers, that is a choice we make in every single interaction we have.
[33:08] So yes, givers are people whose default instinct is to ask, what can I do for you?
[33:12] And takers want to know, well, what are you going to do for me?
[33:16] Very few of us are purely in one or the other mode all the time or even most of the time.
[33:22] Many people, especially professionally, prefer to be matchers and say, I'll do something for you if you do something for me.
[33:28] And they're trying to basically follow the rule of reciprocity and keep things fair and even.
[33:33] And I originally got interested in this topic because I saw in every industry, in every country that had been studied, these three styles came out over and over again.
[33:44] And I thought it was interesting to watch.
[33:45] So this is give us, take us and match us.
[33:46] Exactly.
[33:47] Yeah.
[33:48] And I first wanted to understand, you know, how do they influence our success?
[33:51] And then secondly, how do you become a giver without sacrificing your own success?
[33:58] And then at some point, this distinction popped up where some people, their idea of being a giver was, I'm going to do whatever I can to advance our shared mission.
[34:08] Yeah.
[34:08] And that's not you being selfish in the, I want to extract all the value from you guys and not contribute.
[34:15] It's my contribution is focused on a goal we've agreed on.
[34:19] And where to put that in the framework has been tricky for me.
[34:22] That is tricky.
[34:24] It sounds to me like you're, so there's been a lot of work on task oriented versus relationship oriented leadership.
[34:32] Well, for me personally, I mean, separate to this group, I mean, I've done so much thinking and writing even on how to prioritize relationships over work, to put it broadly.
[34:47] Um, but I find that even just how you put it before, where it's, uh, think putting the team mission first is all well and good.
[34:55] But what if what you think is the right path is different than what someone else thinks?
[35:00] So it's like you have the same end goal, but we might all have different ideas of how we should get there.
[35:05] Yeah.
[35:05] That seems to link to perfectionism a bit to me.
[35:08] Yeah.
[35:08] Because you want it to be perfect.
[35:09] I'm not saying that you do because to be honest, I think you're being a bit harsh on yourself because having worked with creative people before, you're one of the best people, the best person I've ever worked with.
[35:20] Notice he said one of and then cut himself.
[35:22] He's often in charge of editing, so that'll come out.
[35:28] At advancing a creative idea without stamping on people or including people in the process.
[35:33] I think you're being harsh on yourself.
[35:35] Well, that's nice to know, but I do... Yeah, I do feel that and maybe... And that's nice, but I do think that that is...
[35:42] It's definitely an issue that I have in my relationship at home with my partner where I know intellectually because of doing this show so much and reading.
[35:52] I read so much about this stuff.
[35:54] So I know intellectually that I will...
[35:57] Without a shadow of a doubt, be far happier as a person if I prioritize relationships than if I win every award in the world.
[36:05] I know that for a fact, but I find it very hard to put that into action.
[36:11] Well, I think one of the reasons you find that hard is because you're not just optimizing for happiness here.
[36:16] If you were, you'd probably have a completely different life.
[36:19] So you mean I'm optimizing for success or purpose?
[36:22] And success maybe.
[36:24] But the way you're talking about your mission and the way that you look up to creative people, you find that meaningful.
[36:29] And you're willing to trade off a little bit of daily joy for doing something that you think is original or worthwhile.
[36:37] And that that what that often brings is because you're committed to that mission, you're very task focused and goal oriented.
[36:45] And your worry is, OK, I don't want to neglect the people I care about in the way that I pursue that goal.
[36:52] But I think having that conversation as a group is one of the ways that you keep that in check.
[36:57] And yeah, I guess.
[36:59] So what's what's the verdict?
[37:00] Josh, you're saying Ryan's not a taker.
[37:02] No, no, I don't think so.
[37:04] It's tough to put him on the spot.
[37:06] Hugh, where do you come back?
[37:08] No, you don't need to answer because of course you're going to say that I'm not a taker.
[37:14] No, well, I think you're... Well, maybe not.
[37:17] I'm surprised to hear you say all of that.
[37:19] Oh, right, yeah.
[37:20] Well... Because I feel like you're also very supportive of other people's creative ideas.
[37:26] And even if you clearly think it's not a good idea, you'll let that person explore it and work it through.
[37:32] And I think that's a very selfless thing to do because it'd be so easy to go.
[37:35] I could save half an hour here and just say, that's a terrible idea.
[37:39] Well, this... Because, yeah, well, I mean, often I do...
[37:42] Even if I think – I think it probably depends on where I'm at in life.
[37:47] I'm probably – my patience levels probably – and not in a good way.
[37:51] My patience levels do probably vary.
[37:54] Yeah, Adam, you are that sort of psychologist, sorry.
[37:57] Yeah, no, this is a male –
[38:00] There was something you said before that I found really powerful and it's a trap I've fallen into and I'm sure other people do too is when you work on something, especially something creative, the leap that people make and I certainly made it a lot of that idea was bad, I'm bad and not leaping over the I'm bad and learning to embrace.
[38:23] I think I'm trying to get to a position where a bad idea is almost exciting.
[38:29] That is a place that I would love to land at one day.
[38:32] I'm not sure I'm there, but it seems like maybe a dream.
[38:34] It's aspirational for sure.
[38:36] Yeah.
[38:36] I mean, look, I think...
[38:38] A lot of people confuse doubting your ideas and doubting yourself.
[38:43] Doubting your ideas is healthy, right?
[38:46] You need to do some of that to question whether you're on a productive path.
[38:49] If you never question your ideas, you're at risk for throwing good money after bad, for falling into a trap that Barry Stahl has called escalation of commitment to a losing course of action, right?
[39:02] Where you make a decision, it doesn't go as you hoped, and then instead of rethinking it, you double down and invest more time, more energy, more resources, and then you really regret it later.
[39:11] So you want to question your ideas and doubt whether each idea is good.
[39:16] Self-doubt is what holds us back, where you're constantly grappling with the question of, am I ever going to be capable of doing this?
[39:24] And when people feel that, they generally stop trying.
[39:28] Uh, some give up some, um, end up doing some version of self handicapping where they don't give a task, their full effort, because then if it doesn't work, they can say, well, I know I didn't try my hardest.
[39:40] Done that a lot.
[39:41] Yeah.
[39:41] Actually, Andy Weir, who wrote the Martian, uh, had a really interesting take on this.
[39:46] He, he told me that, uh, he fully expects most of his ideas to be bad.
[39:51] And that's okay.
[39:53] He's not judging himself, his creative abilities, by the quality of each idea he generates.
[39:58] What he's trying to do is create a critical mass of possibilities to find one that's worth pursuing.
[40:03] And I sometimes think about this in terms of, you know, like you think the bigger a haystack is, the harder it is to find a needle.
[40:10] In the creative process, the bigger the haystack, the more needles there are, which is a metaphor that should never be used again, and I regret it already.
[40:19] Yeah.
[40:22] But I think what I should have said.
[40:24] It's a dangerous way to come up with ideas, to rifle through a haystack of needles.
[40:28] Yeah, I would not recommend to anyone.
[40:30] But one star on that concept.
[40:35] What I should have said.
[40:38] That will be left in just a while.
[40:40] Please, yeah, keep it.
[40:42] That's my worst idea of the day, for sure.
[40:45] I'm like, yes, bad idea.
[40:47] We made it.
[40:50] I think one of the things that's really encouraging when you look at the huge body of evidence on creativity is –
[40:59] The more bad ideas you have, the more good ideas you have.
[41:03] Because what happens is when you just increase the number of ideas you generate, more volume leads to more variety.
[41:11] And when you exhaust the pool of obvious ideas, you've freed yourself up to think about –
[41:16] less obvious possibilities.
[41:17] And so I do think that, you know, generating a lot of bad ideas is a leading indicator that you're more likely to come up with some good ones.
[41:23] And, you know, you can see this with studies of inventors and musicians and scientists where, you know, just having a lot of options on the table and churning out a lot of kind of half-baked ideas was just part of the process of stumbling onto a few good ones.
[41:41] So I like that.
[41:42] What do you think as far as like,
[41:44] when to abandon an idea.
[41:47] So it's like often I've found like if I've got an idea, my immediate thought, I hit a roadblock.
[41:52] I get excited about the initial germ of an idea.
[41:55] Oh, that's a cool thing.
[41:57] And then I spend 10 minutes and then I hit an obstacle and I'm like, oh, this is hard now.
[42:01] And then I could abandon it or I could like push through it and then I'm like, oh, actually this is, you know, when you solve the problem that you realize that, oh, this is actually good.
[42:11] And I find that often if the more like,
[42:14] Not any idea, but most ideas I think can be good if you just push through those initial obstacles.
[42:20] I don't know if you've got any thoughts on that.
[42:23] Well, I think when you hit a wall on an idea, the first thing you do is you put it away and you come back to it.
[42:28] That's the first test.
[42:29] If you give up right away, you haven't given yourself a chance to incubate.
[42:32] I think if that fails, the second thing you do is you go to somebody else who doesn't share your perspective and you ask them to think it through.
[42:40] What's interesting about other people as a sounding board is they're usually faster to diagnose the problem than you are because they have distance from it.
[42:48] And often they're worse at solving it because they have distance from it.
[42:51] And so they can tell you what's broken, but then they tell you the fix that makes sense to them.
[42:55] And they don't realize the 19 other problems that's going to cause.
[42:57] Yes, of course.
[42:58] And so very often what I'll do is I'll ask, you know, I'm stuck on something.
[43:02] I'll ask people for, you know, their reaction and they'll give me a bunch of solutions.
[43:06] And I don't like any of the solutions.
[43:09] But in looking at what their solutions are accomplishing, I'll start to realize, oh, that's the problem you're trying to solve.
[43:15] Now I know what's not working and I have an idea about how to fix it.
[43:18] So I think that's where you start.
[43:21] The fundamental thing to recognize here is once you've invested a little bit in an idea, you are compromised when it comes to deciding whether you should continue pursuing it.
[43:32] One, because you are in an escalation of commitment situation.
[43:36] You've got ego and image potentially on the line.
[43:39] I've got to prove to myself and everyone else that this was a good idea and that I am a good decision maker and I'm spending my time well.
[43:45] And then there's also like on the opposite side, Ryan, it sounds like you have the fear of failure problem, too, of maybe I don't want to go forward because this might not work out and that's going to feel bad or look bad.
[43:56] And because of both of those things, either together or separately, you have to recognize, OK, I'm no longer able to be a neutral, independent judge.
[44:05] I need to go to somebody else whose judgment I trust, ideally multiple people, and ask them how much potential do you see here?
[44:11] And by the way, here are my goals.
[44:13] And given those goals, do you think this is a better use of time than other things I'm considering?
[44:17] I think that's where I would start.
[44:18] Yeah.
[44:19] And that's a hard thing.
[44:21] I shudder at the thought of that as well, because I feel like I'm exposing an idea, a half-backed idea for someone to go like, I don't know.
[44:28] And then I'm just tempted to say, yeah, it's not finished.
[44:30] Yeah, I knew it wasn't good.
[44:32] I knew it wasn't good.
[44:32] That's why I'm coming to you.
[44:34] But then I get that feeling of failure, even though I know that it's not.
[44:38] There's a feeling of like humiliation or something, even though I know intellectually that it's not finished.
[44:43] And anyway.
[44:44] Well, I think that's where having a, what I've started to think of as a failure budget is really helpful.
[44:50] A failure budget.
[44:51] Yeah.
[44:51] I set the expectation every year that I'm going to launch three projects that fail.
[44:55] And the reason I do that is not because I want to aim for three failures.
[45:00] It's because if I don't fail, it means I'm not aiming high enough and I'm not stretching beyond my comfort zone enough.
[45:07] And when I go into the year, I started this year and said, OK, I'm going to do a bunch of new projects.
[45:13] I'm expecting three of them to fail.
[45:15] The first one tanked last week.
[45:18] And I'm like, check.
[45:20] That's one of the failures.
[45:21] And it doesn't hurt as much because I knew it was coming.
[45:24] And I think in the portfolio of things that I do, you know, I need to go in with the anticipation that not all of them are going to work.
[45:33] And so it doesn't even feel like a failure so much as, you know, that was a that was an experiment.
[45:39] It's a lot in the budget.
[45:40] Yeah.
[45:40] It didn't return the results I wanted.
[45:42] But I learned something and I, you know, I sort of caught my losses on it.
[45:45] And I'm glad I pulled the plug now as opposed to next year.
[45:48] Yeah.
[45:49] Earlier you were talking about the character potential as opposed to sort of career or career potential.
[45:56] And I thought it related to your diving actually in that the character potential is something you've got 100% control over.
[46:03] That's right.
[46:05] Yeah.
[46:06] Actually, I mean, you see this everywhere.
[46:09] Probably my favorite person I wrote about in Hidden Potential is a chess grandmaster named Maurice Ashley, who long before he became world class at chess, he was a chess coach in his 20s and took a group of poor racial minorities to the national championships where they crushed these elite ritzy private schools that had far more training and experience.
[46:29] And one of the things that Maurice taught his chess players was you cannot control your outcomes.
[46:36] The results are not up to you.
[46:37] All you can control are your decisions.
[46:40] And diving was the same way.
[46:42] My coach Eric would tell me, look, the person who wins the meet is usually the person who does the most dives.
[46:49] And, but you end up a little bit off balance on one takeoff and that could ruin your entire meet.
[46:56] Like it's, you know, it's a sport that's, it's probably like golf in that way where, you know, it's sort of you win or lose on these infinitesimally small decisions.
[47:06] And at some point you have to sit down and realize that.
[47:09] that the result is not under my control as much as I would like it to be.
[47:13] But I can control the effort I put into developing, you know, not just my skills, but also the person I become.
[47:21] And actually this is one of the defining moments for me on the sort of on the giver taker topic is I had a – I was coaching over the summer and I had a goal of being an all-state diver, which was going to be top six.
[47:37] And there was a guy who had finished, I don't know, 10th or 11th the summer before who came to camp as a camper.
[47:44] And I had this dilemma of should I coach him?
[47:47] Should I help him even though he's a rival of mine?
[47:51] And I decided in that moment that the person I wanted to be was I want to be somebody who tries to help everyone improve.
[47:57] And I don't want to win because I held someone back.
[48:01] And so my specialty was the rip entry where you go in without a splash.
[48:05] It was the one thing I was good at as a diver.
[48:09] And every once in a while, there'd be a judge who'd complain to my coach, all he can do is rip.
[48:13] And my coach would be like, yeah, so that's what the score is.
[48:18] I remember the diving that I've watched, I always remember thinking that was the most impressive part.
[48:23] I mean, I would agree with that.
[48:24] But also, you know, it'd be nice if you could jump, you know, like –
[48:28] 12 meters higher and spin a lot faster and do harder dives.
[48:31] But anyway, so I taught him how to do a cleaner entry.
[48:35] He started making much less splash, and then he beat me in the state finals.
[48:40] Really?
[48:40] And I was much less disappointed than I expected because I felt like I'd done the right thing.
[48:47] And I also realized at that point, hey, my goal was to make the state finals, and I did that.
[48:55] Is there any, is there any, cause I, cause I, you telling that story and I, and I guess I've thought about this a bit, but it, it definitely feels better when you help other people than when you achieve, when you do things for yourself.
[49:10] You know, I think we all have a version of that or an example of that that we can think of, but is there any, uh, not that I need it, but is there any data or like science on that or like research?
[49:20] There's a lot.
[49:21] Yes.
[49:23] Uh, there's an amazing book, which I wrote.
[49:27] Sorry.
[49:28] Let's go.
[49:29] No, no, I couldn't resist.
[49:31] Uh, yeah, I think, well, first of all, I think the, the, the first thing I would say is, um, sports are often a tricky place to learn this lesson because they're so zero sum.
[49:40] And if you help your direct competitor, that can hurt you, but most of life doesn't work that way.
[49:45] Um, most of life, um, and certainly most workplaces, you actually get rewarded for helping others.
[49:51] So, um,
[49:51] There's a meta-analysis, a study of studies by Podzikoff and colleagues where they look at data from over 50,000 people across a whole range of jobs and industries and organizational cultures.
[50:02] And they show that the time you spend helping other people is as influential in predicting your performance reviews and your promotion rate as how well you do your actual job.
[50:12] And wow.
[50:14] So what that tells you is workplaces really value not just are you an individual superstar, but also do you elevate the people around you?
[50:22] And there's a lot of other evidence that speaks to that.
[50:25] You have to be careful about not overextending yourself to the point of burnout.
[50:30] Don't let yourself get exploited by takers would also be a good piece of advice.
[50:34] But in general, in the long run, you're...
[50:36] givers do end up achieving far more success than people expect.
[50:41] And they also end up sometimes with a little bit less happiness in the short term, but a greater sense of meaning and satisfaction in the longterm because they, they feel like they've spent their time on, on things that matter.
[50:52] And so,
[50:54] I spent a long time saying, okay, look, when you study engineers' productivity and salespeople's revenue and medical students' grades, the givers often do worse in the short run because they're distracted by helping others.
[51:08] But in the long run, they end up building stronger relationships.
[51:11] They end up learning more by solving other people's problems.
[51:13] They end up more motivated because they're doing it for someone other than themselves.
[51:18] And that really helps them become more successful in the long run.
[51:21] I'm less motivated to make that argument now, even though there's a lot of evidence to support it.
[51:26] I just would say, look, there are multiple paths to success.
[51:30] And being a taker is a great way to shoot yourself in the foot in the long run.
[51:34] But I'm not saying everyone has to be a giver.
[51:37] I would just say if there are multiple ways to succeed, wouldn't you rather succeed in ways that lift other people up as opposed to cut them down?
[51:43] And just for everyone, which book is that?
[51:45] Give and Take.
[51:45] Give and Take.
[51:46] That's great.
[51:47] No obligation to read it.
[51:48] The TED Talk is much shorter.
[51:50] And what's so interesting is you even see this in places where you would never expect it.
[51:55] So Steve Jobs, not my idea of a giver.
[51:58] He's one of the founders of Apple.
[52:00] Yep.
[52:01] If you read the stories about Jobs, he was a tyrant in a lot of ways.
[52:06] And a lot of people would call him a taker.
[52:08] He's hogged credit for work done by one of his co-founders.
[52:13] He was often an abusive boss.
[52:16] And yet, after he got fired from Apple, his own company, and came back, one of the things he really invested in was trying to treat other people better.
[52:26] And when he was asked what his proudest accomplishment was, you know, you would think he would say it was the Mac or the iPhone.
[52:34] And no, he said it was the team that built those products.
[52:38] And, you know, even Steve Jobs understood.
[52:41] But I remember hearing him and then also some, I've heard interviews with different Apple employees from that time talk.
[52:48] And he was, yes, he was a tyrant, but they, a lot of them do talk about the fact that even though he was a horrible boss and, and often abusive, he was, he was, he was, he
[52:58] they are grateful for the time because they're proud of what they were able to achieve because of how he pushed them.
[53:05] So it's an interesting, like kind of like sort of like that shared goal, how to get there thing.
[53:11] Not that you should treat people like that, but often I do find I've worked in environments where the person with power is, you know, can be somewhat aggressive or abusive, but people do look up to them and people are like kind of like, uh,
[53:27] As a leader, people are willing to follow them because they respect them.
[53:30] Yeah.
[53:31] I think that people are more willing to tolerate disrespectful behavior by someone they respect.
[53:38] And they might say, I don't like you, but you share my standards or my taste or I'm really impressed by what you achieved and I want to be part of that.
[53:49] I think though, it's, it's such a travesty when people hold that up as an exemplar and they say, well, well, you know, look at, look at the leaders who operate that way.
[53:56] Therefore, if you want to do that, you have to be successful.
[53:59] First of all, there's no, there's no one road to success in anything, right?
[54:02] Um, if you're a systems dynamics person, uh, you'd say equifinality is the core principle of a complex world, which is a lot of syllables to say there are many paths to the same end.
[54:13] And that's always true.
[54:14] Um, secondly, I would say when we look at those examples, um, we're often learning the wrong lessons.
[54:19] Like,
[54:19] did Steve jobs succeed because of being a tyrant?
[54:23] Um, I would say the weight of the evidence is that he succeeded in spite of those tendencies.
[54:28] Um, you know, he wouldn't have been kicked out of his own company if he had been kinder to other people.
[54:32] And in fact, you know, the Steve jobs that came back to Apple, um, Ed Catmull, who, um,
[54:36] I co-founded and ran Pixar for a long time and had one of the best working relationships with Steve Jobs of anybody.
[54:42] And wrote an incredible book.
[54:43] Yeah, Creativity Inc.
[54:45] I've talked with Ed about this over the years.
[54:48] And one of the things I took away from him was, first of all, Jobs treated you differently if he respected you.
[54:53] And he was in awe of Ed's creative genius as a computer animation pioneer.
[54:57] And so Ed got a better version of Steve Jobs than other people did.
[55:01] Yeah.
[55:02] But also- He got the conditional love.
[55:04] He did.
[55:04] Yes, exactly.
[55:06] Yes, conditional on you must be such a clear genius that I can't ever call you a moron.
[55:12] Yeah.
[55:14] But the thing that Ed observed was he said Steve Jobs came back to Apple and he made a concerted effort to override his assholic tendencies to try to be a better boss.
[55:27] And I think that that – actually Walter Isaacson who wrote the Jobs biography –
[55:33] I asked a ton of people who worked closely with him, what one piece of advice would you give to Steve Jobs?
[55:39] And he said the most frequent answer was people said he could have been kinder and it would have cost him nothing and it would have earned him tremendous loyalty.
[55:47] Wow.
[55:48] Very interesting.
[55:49] There's a word in front of me that I've been wanting to ask you about and the word is languishing.
[55:54] Meh.
[55:54] I mean, not languishing.
[55:59] Yeah.
[56:01] Well, partly in part because my friends from school, their nickname for me is the Languisher.
[56:06] Really?
[56:06] Yes.
[56:06] Why?
[56:07] Well, because we used to play, not anymore because we're all too busy, we used to play, I was going to call them silly sports, not silly sports, just non-mainstream sports.
[56:16] Like we had a competition called Gold Bullion and we'd play it every two months and it was like mini golf or table tennis or bocce or things like that.
[56:25] And I would always, we'd have a scorecard and I was always languishing.
[56:28] That's why it was nothing professional.
[56:30] I was just used to languish at these games terribly.
[56:32] Yeah, because I didn't say you was a languisher.
[56:34] No, but I was with non-traditional sports.
[56:36] I languished down the bottom of the scoreboard.
[56:38] I never thought about that as an identity before.
[56:40] You'd be a person who languishes.
[56:44] But it was funny, I took on that persona whenever I turned up to play these games.
[56:47] I was like, oh, I'll probably languish again.
[56:51] Anyway.
[56:52] I think what's funny is I sat down to write this article to explain something that was so many people were experiencing during COVID.
[57:01] And I have never seen people so excited to talk about their utter lack of excitement.
[57:06] People are like, meh.
[57:12] Why are you so enthusiastic about your absence of enthusiasm?
[57:16] What is going on here?
[57:17] So it's just a funny thing to get excited to talk about what it is.
[57:22] At that time, there was probably a shared feeling of meh.
[57:25] Yes.
[57:26] So it probably connected.
[57:27] People felt seen in a way that they hadn't before.
[57:29] I mean, we may be getting back to the category of feeling like you're not living up to your potential, but many people have that lack of enthusiasm still in their daily lives.
[57:38] They feel like they're doing a job that they don't love or perhaps in a relationship, but they don't feel like it's serving them too well.
[57:44] And they have that feeling of languishing, but continue to languish.
[57:49] I'm so interested in your thoughts on that.
[57:50] Yeah, I do think it's a vicious cycle.
[57:52] So sociologist Corey Keyes coined the term, although some would credit the philosopher Mariah Carey, which she did do a languishing song.
[58:02] But I think Keyes defines languishing as feeling a sense of emptiness and stagnation, which meh or blah is a good description of.
[58:13] And he has this great spectrum where he says on one end, you could be depressed or burned out.
[58:18] That's like the valley of ill being.
[58:20] That's like mental illness at some level.
[58:24] On the other end, you're flourishing or thriving.
[58:27] And that's the peak of well-being.
[58:29] And right in the middle, you have languishing, which he calls the absence of well-being.
[58:33] So you don't have the presence of negative symptoms.
[58:36] You're not burned out.
[58:37] You still have energy.
[58:38] You're not depressed.
[58:39] You still have hope.
[58:40] But you're missing the sense of purpose and motivation and excitement that would put you on the other end of that spectrum.
[58:47] And I think the irony of languishing is that you start to feel your motivation wanes.
[58:53] Your focus gets diluted.
[58:56] And then you stop making progress on things that you care about.
[59:00] And then that makes you languish all the more.
[59:02] And you start to turn inward.
[59:03] And you're like, why am I not doing anything?
[59:05] Why am I falling short of my potential?
[59:06] Why am I not motivated?
[59:08] And then you ruminate and you get in your own head.
[59:11] And then the feeling of languishing intensifies.
[59:13] And over time, languishing doesn't just become the feeling of being stuck.
[59:17] It actually becomes the force that keeps you stuck.
[59:20] Is that track?
[59:20] I mean, it tracks perfectly with my experience of goal bullying.
[59:23] I lose every single time because of my persona.
[59:27] I get stuck in languishing.
[59:28] Then, I mean, maybe this is the big question, but how do you break that cycle?
[59:34] I don't know.
[59:34] I just study it.
[59:38] Well, I think I think if you look at if you look at the evidence, there are a few things that help.
[59:41] One is small wins having just a little bit of momentum.
[59:44] I think this is why like so many people got into baking sourdough or playing words with friends is it was that little jolt of I did something today.
[59:55] And that feeling of I could do this is a source of momentum.
[1:00:00] That really dings a bell in my head because when I was – I had my first child at the start of COVID, so I had a very different experience of COVID to a lot of people.
[1:00:09] But prior to that, I felt like I was languishing and the thing I loved more than anything was cooking.
[1:00:14] And I'd get home at the end of the day and try and cook a really complicated meal because I just loved the fact that I could –
[1:00:20] get a small win, I guess.
[1:00:21] I never really looked at it like that.
[1:00:22] But to me, it was just like, at least I can complete a task today and it's done.
[1:00:27] It's over and maybe it fails sometimes, but a lot of the time it's good.
[1:00:31] Yeah.
[1:00:31] I mean, it gives you a sense of progress.
[1:00:32] I was able to do something well today.
[1:00:34] The other thing that's interesting about cooking is there was some research early in the pandemic looking at, there were some psychologists who happened to be surveying people on their wellbeing and,
[1:00:43] before the pandemic started.
[1:00:45] And then they followed up with them during to try to figure out who's been able to maintain their well-being despite the fear, the anxiety, the lockdowns, et cetera.
[1:00:54] And everybody assumed it was going to be optimism.
[1:00:58] And it wasn't.
[1:01:00] The people who maintain their well-being were the ones who managed to keep finding flow, that got that daily absorption in deep work where they had a project or
[1:01:09] you know, just a cooking dinner where they got in the zone and it took them out of the pandemic and into something that they could put their full attention on.
[1:01:21] And that, you know, that felt like it was, you know, it was like a, it was an enjoyable experience.
[1:01:27] And so I think looking for those flow states and not having divided attention is a big part of getting out of languishing as well.
[1:01:34] So my wife would say if she walked past our study at home and it's absolutely spotless, that means I should be, I've got something I need to be doing, but instead I'm making sure that the place is entirely clean and there's tea or coffee waiting just there and there's classical music playing.
[1:01:50] I need everything to do.
[1:01:50] I just procrastinate to a certain extent.
[1:01:54] You have said that there is a healthy level of procrastination that sits in there somewhere.
[1:01:58] It's not all bad.
[1:01:59] Yeah.
[1:01:59] In certain situations, yeah.
[1:02:01] So Jihei Shin and I did some research where we found that people who procrastinate a little bit are more creative than people who do none or a lot.
[1:02:12] That's great to hear.
[1:02:14] Yeah.
[1:02:15] By the way, this is my mission in life, to just encourage people to procrastinate on every... No.
[1:02:19] Validate that procrastination.
[1:02:21] What I'm trying to do is normalize it.
[1:02:23] And the first thing, of course, is this really causal situation.
[1:02:27] So we do some experiments where we were asking people to generate creative ideas.
[1:02:32] You have to come up with a business idea, for example.
[1:02:34] And on the screen, as you're doing that, we've tempted you to procrastinate with different numbers of funny YouTube videos.
[1:02:42] So some people, there's just one there.
[1:02:43] Some people, there are four or five.
[1:02:44] Some people have eight.
[1:02:46] And we end up getting people to procrastinate more based on how many of those hilarious YouTube videos are sitting there.
[1:02:52] And what we find is when you've been randomly assigned to be tempted to procrastinate moderately, you actually generate ideas that are rated by experts as more creative, more novel, more useful.
[1:03:02] And what happens is that that little bit of procrastination, it allows you to incubate.
[1:03:07] So the time defocused from the task where, you know, it's kind of in the back of your mind, you're more likely to reframe the problem.
[1:03:16] You're more likely to activate unexpected connections.
[1:03:20] And that's good for creativity.
[1:03:21] But it only works if you're intrinsically interested in the problem.
[1:03:26] So if you're just procrastinating because you're bored or you have no interest in it or you feel like it's a pointless task, then you're not going to get the benefit.
[1:03:35] You're not going to incubate.
[1:03:37] Whereas if you're interested but you put it off because it's hard and you haven't figured it out yet or you're anxious about whether you can do it but you still care about it, then it starts to increase the likelihood that you can unlock something.
[1:03:52] Right.
[1:03:53] I'm just thinking my wife right now listening going, gee, you mustn't have had much work on recently.
[1:03:57] It's been a mess for a long time.
[1:04:00] So we hear from a lot of people doing this podcast that imposter syndrome is something they're grappling with.
[1:04:05] And I just wanted to hear your thoughts on it because I know it's something you have written about and talked about extensively.
[1:04:11] Yeah.
[1:04:11] So a lot of my thinking on this is informed by Basima Tufik's research.
[1:04:15] She was one of our PhD students.
[1:04:16] She's now an MIT professor and
[1:04:18] And Basima took on the idea that the feeling of being an imposter, why do we have to turn it into a syndrome?
[1:04:24] Like it's a chronic debilitating disease.
[1:04:27] And yes, there are people who walk around feeling like, oh yeah, I've heard of imposter syndrome, but I am an actual fraud.
[1:04:35] I've never earned a single accomplishment in my life.
[1:04:37] And it's only a matter of minutes until everyone finds out.
[1:04:41] And that is debilitating.
[1:04:42] You don't want to feel that.
[1:04:43] That is extremely rare.
[1:04:45] What is common is... That is extremely rare.
[1:04:47] Yeah, that's rare.
[1:04:48] Feeling like a total fraud.
[1:04:50] Feeling like you've never deserved anything you've accomplished.
[1:04:53] What's common are imposter thoughts, which are the everyday pangs of, I wonder if other people are overestimating me.
[1:05:01] I wonder if I'm up to this challenge.
[1:05:04] Am I ready for this promotion or this role?
[1:05:07] Am I as good as other people think I am?
[1:05:10] And what Pasima shows is that having those thoughts more often is not costly.
[1:05:14] It's actually beneficial.
[1:05:16] She studied investment professionals, medical professionals, military cadets.
[1:05:19] Turns out they persist longer in their work when they have those imposter thoughts because they realize there's a gap between what other people expect of them, what they feel capable of, and they need to put in extra effort to close the gap.
[1:05:30] And then also they learn more.
[1:05:32] They're more thoughtful in their interactions with other people because they realize they don't know everything.
[1:05:37] And so the big question that comes out of this is what do you do with the feeling of being an imposter?
[1:05:43] And I've come to think it's a paradox that on the one hand, you're saying, look, I don't know what I'm doing.
[1:05:52] I don't.
[1:05:53] I don't believe in myself.
[1:05:56] And on the other hand, you're saying, but I definitely know that I don't know what I'm doing.
[1:06:01] And I'm going to trust my own opinion over the expectations and beliefs of other people.
[1:06:05] Well, you can't have it both ways.
[1:06:07] Either you know what you're doing or you don't.
[1:06:09] Anyway, so when you confront that paradox, what I would say is it's really tempting to trust your own judgment over other people's because you have more information about yourself than any other person will ever have about you.
[1:06:23] What you're forgetting is that other people see you more objectively.
[1:06:26] They're more neutral.
[1:06:27] They have more distance.
[1:06:28] And that gives them an accurate viewpoint that's just invisible to you.
[1:06:34] And I think what that means is if multiple people believe in you, it's probably time to believe them.
[1:06:40] And that when you feel like an imposter, it doesn't necessarily mean that you're being overestimated by other people.
[1:06:47] It often means that you're underestimating yourself.
[1:06:50] Because the people around you, especially if there's more than one, they have seen a capacity for growth in you that you cannot see yet.
[1:06:57] And you should trust that you have that potential and then see what you can do to try to live up to it.
[1:07:03] That to me is a healthy attitude toward imposter syndrome.
[1:07:06] And Basima goes a step further and she says, look, when you feel like an imposter, you should just say, other people think I could be pretty awesome.
[1:07:14] And now let me go and try to make them proud.
[1:07:18] Yeah, that's great.
[1:07:19] It also strikes me that it's a focusing mechanism as well, about to isolate something that you clearly care about.
[1:07:26] Yes.
[1:07:27] Tell me, say more.
[1:07:27] I'm curious to hear how you play that out.
[1:07:30] Well, to use a personal example of me, when we started doing this show, Hugh and Ryan were only on the microphones and I was the tech person.
[1:07:38] And then I started asking questions and sort of,
[1:07:42] edged my way into the show.
[1:07:43] But then we started, then I sat here and very impressive people like yourself were coming on and I was like, maybe I shouldn't be here.
[1:07:51] But then I realized that it actually meant that I really focused and I had to really control, like really think and stay in the moment to make sure that I did the absolute best I could because I was kind of, the button was red and it was recording.
[1:08:05] So I didn't really have an option.
[1:08:06] I can't just be silent.
[1:08:08] So there's no, when you're in that imposter zone, you can't just mail it in.
[1:08:12] No, you have to like, I've got to give everything in because I feel like a rise to the occasion.
[1:08:17] Yes.
[1:08:18] Yeah.
[1:08:18] That's a great way to describe it.
[1:08:20] I think that's spot on.
[1:08:21] And I think that could be Basima's next research project.
[1:08:25] Basima, if you're listening, I'd love to see you write this paper.
[1:08:28] That'd be interesting.
[1:08:29] Rising to the occasion.
[1:08:30] That's exactly what it is.
[1:08:32] This is not a question I expected to go down, but I feel like it's come up on the podcast a bit before and I don't know if we've ever really gone into it.
[1:08:42] We have, but it still hasn't locked in my head because I don't think I know what mine are.
[1:08:46] But I've noticed a few times you've talked about things aligning with your values.
[1:08:51] Was it an active task for you to define your values?
[1:08:53] And if so, how does one go about that?
[1:08:55] Yeah, I think it's, I think, um, I, I don't want to say, I think everyone should do that, uh, because I don't want to give people yet another should, I think there are a lot of benefits to doing it and a lot of costs to not doing it.
[1:09:08] Uh, but I think that's everybody's choice to decide how they want that to play out for them.
[1:09:13] Uh, yeah, I mean, I, I sat down and the first thing I did was I looked at my role models and said, what do those people stand for?
[1:09:21] And what are the patterns across them?
[1:09:22] And when you did this, what point of your career or life?
[1:09:26] 19.
[1:09:27] Oh, 19.
[1:09:27] Yeah, I was in school.
[1:09:30] And well, in part what happened was a few of my role models became less... You know how they say, don't meet your heroes?
[1:09:39] Sometimes you should stop watching your heroes too.
[1:09:41] Because you're like, oh, I do not respect you the way I think I did once upon a time.
[1:09:48] And I realized, I don't think I had captured it then, but I was starting to realize that I didn't want to admire people.
[1:09:56] I wanted to admire specific virtues that they exemplified.
[1:10:00] And so I started then trying to take a more, I guess, like a more feature proof.
[1:10:04] Yeah, exactly.
[1:10:05] I'm like, hey, you know what?
[1:10:06] If you can, you can admire, I don't know who, well, who are your, who are your role models?
[1:10:12] Give me, give me people you've looked up to for something.
[1:10:14] Jim Carrey, I guess for me.
[1:10:16] Yeah, definitely.
[1:10:17] Yep.
[1:10:18] Billy Connolly for me.
[1:10:23] for a lot of my life, Hugh, and still.
[1:10:24] My brother.
[1:10:26] Wow.
[1:10:26] Not so much anymore.
[1:10:27] Okay.
[1:10:27] So Jim Carrey is the one I'm most familiar with of the three.
[1:10:30] So if you admire Jim Carrey's comedy, as opposed to admiring Jim Carrey, it's a lot easier than to say not a great track record with women in certain cases.
[1:10:40] Mm-hmm.
[1:10:42] And that's not totally disqualifying because he's still a comedic genius.
[1:10:47] So I went through that exercise and I realized...
[1:10:52] okay, there's some things they have in common.
[1:10:56] Those are values.
[1:10:58] They're strengths of the persons, but they're things that I think are important and valuable, and that makes them values.
[1:11:04] And so as I did that exercise and then also looked at the people that I knew that I looked up to for specific things, the list was really clear.
[1:11:14] I was like generosity, integrity, excellence, humility, integrity.
[1:11:20] It's like, okay, that's a pretty good starting list.
[1:11:22] And then the hard part is to say, what does it mean to live by those values?
[1:11:26] And what do you do when they're in conflict?
[1:11:28] What do you mean in conflict?
[1:11:30] So you have a choice between generosity and excellence.
[1:11:33] What do you do?
[1:11:33] Gotcha.
[1:11:34] Yeah.
[1:11:34] And I don't think that, you know, over the course of a life, those two things have to be intentioned.
[1:11:38] But in specific situations, they often are.
[1:11:41] Creating the Mac.
[1:11:42] Exactly.
[1:11:42] Yeah.
[1:11:42] Yeah.
[1:11:44] I think for some people, excellence and integrity.
[1:11:48] Butthead's pretty hard.
[1:11:50] And there's a shortcut to success.
[1:11:51] And the question is, are you willing to take it?
[1:11:54] And maybe do something that other people wouldn't approve of.
[1:11:58] So one of the things I decided was values are supposed to be, I learned this from psychologists, values are most useful if they're in a hierarchy and you actually rank order them because then you know, which one will supersede the others.
[1:12:11] Yeah.
[1:12:12] And actually when I first did the exercise, integrity wasn't even on my list because I just took it for granted.
[1:12:16] Like, you know,
[1:12:17] Being a principled person is important to me.
[1:12:19] I was the kid who was afraid to get called to the principal's office, and it didn't even occur to me that that would be something that would be in question.
[1:12:27] And then you watch people that you look up to cheat or lie or steal or do something you think is unethical.
[1:12:33] Wait, that's got to be non-negotiable.
[1:12:35] So that belongs really high in the hierarchy, but it's not something I think about at every moment of every day.
[1:12:41] And so is that my guiding principle?
[1:12:43] No.
[1:12:44] Is it the principle I would be most distraught to jeopardize?
[1:12:48] Absolutely.
[1:12:49] And so it gets really complicated, I think, over time.
[1:12:52] But I think the exercise of asking, all right, what are those patterns?
[1:12:56] And then how do I want to live by those values?
[1:12:58] It's fun.
[1:12:59] And it's kind of eye-opening because you realize, all right, there are a lot of choices I make every day that do not fulfill those values.
[1:13:06] And Josh, you were talking about some of those earlier.
[1:13:09] Yeah.
[1:13:11] The thing that was popping through, I was trying to think of people I admire as well as you're going through that and the attributes of them.
[1:13:16] And it occurred to me that I find that the people I look up to in trying to form what my values are,
[1:13:23] They all seem to be things that I find slightly outside of my reach, naturally.
[1:13:29] For example?
[1:13:30] Well, um...
[1:13:33] The person that was coming into my head as well was Christopher Hitchens.
[1:13:38] And I was thinking about his relentless pursuit of, in his mind, even though I'm sure he was right and wrong many times, but as he would say, truth.
[1:13:48] Yeah.
[1:13:48] And that was a guiding principle.
[1:13:50] Whereas for me, I find that I would rather keep people happy sometimes than be truthful.
[1:13:59] And so that clashes for me, even though I wish I was just like,
[1:14:04] A bit more gung-ho truth.
[1:14:05] But then if I live my life like that, I probably wouldn't have the relationships or the friends I have.
[1:14:11] And so there's a sacrifice there.
[1:14:14] So I find it really confusing.
[1:14:15] Is that true?
[1:14:16] Okay.
[1:14:16] So I've dealt with the same – I've grappled with the same tension.
[1:14:20] Right.
[1:14:20] Yeah.
[1:14:21] So for me, what that plays out as is there's a – I feel torn between honesty and loyalty.
[1:14:26] I want to be candid with the people I care about, but I also don't want to hurt their feelings or damage our relationship.
[1:14:32] And as somebody who's off the charts high in the personality trait of agreeableness, being friendly and polite and wanting to get along with people, I've been in too many situations where I regretted sort of –
[1:14:47] Being polite at the expense of actually being kind.
[1:14:50] Yeah.
[1:14:51] Where I said the thing that was going to make someone feel good today as opposed to telling them what would help them do better tomorrow.
[1:14:58] And it actually – it really hit me when a friend had food in his teeth and I didn't say anything.
[1:15:04] Yeah.
[1:15:05] I'm only hurting them by not saying that.
[1:15:08] So what if they're a little embarrassed?
[1:15:09] They're going to be a lot more embarrassed if a bunch of people see that.
[1:15:13] Why am I not doing this?
[1:15:14] And so that pushed me to say I don't want there to be a tension between honesty and loyalty.
[1:15:23] For me, I want honesty to be the highest expression of loyalty.
[1:15:27] Brilliant.
[1:15:28] I want people to know that when I'm candid with them, it's because I care.
[1:15:32] And so I've got to invest in building relationships where I'm clear about why I'm, you know, maybe telling an unpleasant truth or dishing out some tough love.
[1:15:41] And nobody will ever question, is that coming from a place of care?
[1:15:45] And I guess the risk is that they'll never see it that way.
[1:15:50] The risk is that they'll take it as just like, how dare you, you know, that that's not loyal.
[1:15:56] Like, I thought you were on my side, where in your mind, you're doing it as a kind thing, but they may never take it that way.
[1:16:01] It's a risk, Ryan, but I think the alternate risk is much worse, which is that's not a relationship then.
[1:16:07] It's a charade.
[1:16:08] Hmm.
[1:16:10] If you are – I see this with friendships probably more than anything else.
[1:16:17] you know, if you're friends with somebody and you can't be honest with each other, it's not a real relationship, is it?
[1:16:24] No.
[1:16:25] So why not risk it to try to turn it into one where you can have genuine communication?
[1:16:30] Yeah.
[1:16:30] Yeah.
[1:16:31] You'll find out pretty quickly if it's a relationship.
[1:16:32] I mean, exactly.
[1:16:33] It's a test.
[1:16:34] Yeah.
[1:16:34] Very quickly.
[1:16:35] And the thing is, it's possible to be candid in what you say, but also thoughtful in how you say it.
[1:16:43] Yeah.
[1:16:43] Yeah.
[1:16:44] I feel obligated to say that we did an episode with Dr. Am, our sort of show psychologist, and she talked a lot about truth versus harmony and we'll link to it in the show notes, but it was probably one of our most talked about episodes because I think it resonated with a lot of people, just this exact concept.
[1:16:59] Yeah.
[1:17:00] I feel like we can't have you here and not ask you your thoughts on devices.
[1:17:04] Four kids because, I mean... Oh, my God.
[1:17:07] It's on the horizon for our family, distant horizon at the moment, but there will come a point where they'll be asking for phones.
[1:17:13] I was at a hotel last night and over breakfast watched a family of four.
[1:17:18] Kids would have been, I don't know, maybe 16 and 14, and for the entire time they were slouched on the lounge in front of their phones and the dad...
[1:17:25] exploded about 15 minutes and he said can I not get five minutes talking to my family and he barely got a response from them just kept going on their phone and uh zero judgment from me whatsoever but I was thinking that is just I just find that so sad because it is the opposite my memories of a child is just in dinner time or meal time was such an engaged time with the family of what what's happening in everyone's lives and you've spoken you have got a lot of traction with your thoughts on this I'd love to talk to you about that.
[1:17:52] Yeah, I mean, I don't think this will surprise anyone, but it's really stark in the evidence.
[1:17:57] There's a big study that came out in the last year showing that the earlier kids got a smartphone growing up, the worse their mental health as young adults.
[1:18:09] So, you know, higher depression, lower self-esteem.
[1:18:13] And I don't think it's actually the –
[1:18:15] First of all, it's not a phone, right?
[1:18:17] It's all the things you can do on a phone and all the ways that... My hunch would be, I haven't seen any evidence on this, but an Apple Watch would be better than an iPhone for a kid because that way you can reach them, which is obviously a useful thing, but they're not going to be...
[1:18:34] on their watch all the time.
[1:18:36] Scrolling.
[1:18:37] Exactly.
[1:18:39] And then we could also say, well, okay, it's a correlational study, not a causal study.
[1:18:44] But there are lots of experiments suggesting that some of the things that happen on smartphones are not good for kids, particularly for teenage girls.
[1:18:53] The social comparisons that happen, seeing people's perfect lives on Instagram that make you feel bad about yourself, the trolling and the bullying and the hate that can happen online, and also just the lack of engagement and having meaningful interactions.
[1:19:08] I think what's really tricky about this, so my wife Allison and I were the last holdouts in eighth grade.
[1:19:17] So you've got a bunch of 13-year-olds, and every single one of them has a phone.
[1:19:22] And at that point, if you look at the research, if you're the only kid without a phone, that's bad for your well-being too because you're left out of the group texts and chats and all the snaps and streaks.
[1:19:33] And so you're sort of damned if you do and damned if you don't.
[1:19:36] And I think the...
[1:19:38] I'm a big fan of the idea of no smartphones until high school.
[1:19:43] And high school is...
[1:19:44] Minimum 14 for us.
[1:19:45] Yeah, 14.
[1:19:45] Yeah, okay.
[1:19:47] Yeah.
[1:19:48] I mean, I would even go further.
[1:19:49] I would say you can have a phone for communication, obviously, but you do not need to be... To have a device that can get you on the internet before you can drive.
[1:20:01] And I think what's interesting is how many parents love this idea, and yet there's some of the same parents who are getting their kids smartphones when they're six.
[1:20:09] And I think we're in the middle of what psychologists call a pluralistic ignorance problem, which I've never liked the phrase.
[1:20:18] But it's the idea that people misperceive a norm, and they think they're in the minority, and they don't say anything.
[1:20:26] Um, okay.
[1:20:27] It's like, uh, university students, uh, think that everyone wants to binge drink more than they actually do.
[1:20:33] And so then they go and binge drink thinking everyone else expects them to.
[1:20:36] And then it creates the very norm that didn't exist because everybody's doing it.
[1:20:40] Cause they think everybody else expects it or wants it.
[1:20:44] And I think we're in a similar position with smartphones right now, which is a lot of parents think we're the only ones who think this might not be the healthiest thing for our kids.
[1:20:52] And so we're, you know, we can't say anything.
[1:20:56] We can't get other parents to do anything.
[1:20:58] We can't lobby the school.
[1:20:59] You don't want to guilt other parents as well.
[1:21:00] No, and you don't want to get ostracized either as the weird, you know, Luddite family there is like, also, we don't have electricity.
[1:21:09] Yeah.
[1:21:12] We're all about doing things the way they've always been done.
[1:21:15] So as a result, no parent sees other parents.
[1:21:21] you know, saying no to this.
[1:21:22] And then we end up with a sort of with the lowest common denominator and it's a race to the bottom.
[1:21:29] I mean, other than the obvious economical reason, why don't Apple, Samsung, et cetera, create, which they obviously could, create a kid's phone?
[1:21:43] If kids are going to be using phones anyway, I mean, obviously there are like flip phones and stuff that, you know, for kids...
[1:21:49] But I mean, like a good one that connects with the Apple ecosystem and one that kids actually want to use, but doesn't have the black holes of the entire Internet.
[1:22:00] Like, do you have any insight into why they wouldn't do that?
[1:22:02] That's a great question.
[1:22:04] Here's what I've learned from conversations with tech leaders at Apple and elsewhere is Apple's stance seems to be that they're solving that through parental controls.
[1:22:14] And expecting parents to be responsible to say, I'm going to block my kids from using social media.
[1:22:21] So, you know, you can set those parental controls really easily.
[1:22:24] The problem is most parents aren't vigilant enough to do it.
[1:22:28] And some don't even know how to operate the controls.
[1:22:29] Yeah, and they don't want to fight with their kids every single day.
[1:22:33] It seems, and I feel like Johan Hari maybe spoke about this when he was on, and lots of people have spoken.
[1:22:39] What's his name?
[1:22:39] Tristan?
[1:22:40] Tristan Harris.
[1:22:41] Yeah, Tristan Harris.
[1:22:42] But it seems like it's so unfair for the tech company who can seemingly do whatever they want.
[1:22:49] They have the funds.
[1:22:50] They can create whatever they want, but they're putting the responsibility with the user on.
[1:22:54] when they could very easily go like create a device, market it in a way that is desirable to kids and that is simple and fun and great.
[1:23:06] I've heard you talk about like the fact that playing video games can be very beneficial for kids.
[1:23:11] And so it can have some things which can be beneficial.
[1:23:14] It doesn't have to be like educational unit, you know.
[1:23:19] Apple know how to make cool stuff.
[1:23:20] They know how to market.
[1:23:21] Like they can do it.
[1:23:23] I guess that's like, you know, let's pitch them.
[1:23:25] I think they should do that.
[1:23:26] Yeah.
[1:23:26] Without question.
[1:23:28] I think the other thing we need to do is to think about, okay, there's a lot of pressure coming from Tristan and others to say, let's ban.
[1:23:38] Kids should not be allowed on social media until they're 13 or 15 or 16.
[1:23:42] Yeah.
[1:23:44] And it's just really complicated to do the age verification.
[1:23:49] And then, you know, it's a can of worms in a lot of ways.
[1:23:55] I think maybe a more palatable idea is to say, let's study which specific features of these apps that kids will eventually end up on are most likely to be problematic.
[1:24:06] And how do we manage that?
[1:24:07] So I'll throw out a simple example.
[1:24:09] Your kids aren't old enough for Snapchat yet, thankfully.
[1:24:14] If you download Snapchat, there's a map, the Snap Map, where you can see where your friends are.
[1:24:22] You can hide your own location.
[1:24:24] Great.
[1:24:25] Guess what you can't do?
[1:24:27] You can't unsee your friends' locations.
[1:24:30] So you open up the Snap Map Friday night at 9 p.m., and you see 17 of your friends in the same house, and you weren't invited.
[1:24:38] Wow.
[1:24:39] Hell.
[1:24:39] So what do you do?
[1:24:40] You want to delete Snapchat.
[1:24:41] Only it's the primary mechanism for communicating with all your friends at your school.
[1:24:46] And if you delete it, you're now left out socially.
[1:24:50] I would sit down with the Snap team and say, you should be able to disable as a parent whether kids can see the map.
[1:25:00] What is the value of knowing that your friends have left you out?
[1:25:03] But isn't it just like slightly or not even slightly, but extremely concerning that obviously the very smart people at Snapchat know this, but they don't change it.
[1:25:15] I mean, I don't know.
[1:25:16] It depends why they're not changing it.
[1:25:18] Maybe they have bigger problems to solve.
[1:25:20] And maybe, I don't know how complicated it is to change the code on this.
[1:25:25] But I think this is the kind of conversation we ought to be having.
[1:25:28] I think that's a very generous interpretation.
[1:25:30] I feel like they know full well and it just makes the product more alluring to kids.
[1:25:35] So they keep it there because they make more money.
[1:25:38] Maybe, but they allow the feature of turning off your own location.
[1:25:41] So you'd think you'd be able to toggle on the other side to not see other people's.
[1:25:45] And I guess here's what I would say.
[1:25:47] I've spent enough time giving speeches at tech companies, doing some advising.
[1:25:53] I see a lot of founders and CEOs at various conferences.
[1:25:57] Yeah.
[1:25:58] And inevitably, these decisions are more complex than they get painted in the media.
[1:26:03] And I think a lot of people like here's what I would do if I were running the show.
[1:26:07] If you actually got that job, you would realize, wow, there are a lot more tradeoffs in the decisions that I make in terms of.
[1:26:13] You know, allocating time and attention to one thing and therefore not another.
[1:26:16] And that's not an excuse for some of the decisions that I disagree with.
[1:26:20] It's just a recognition that being a leader of a huge company with, you know, billions of users is really hard.
[1:26:29] And sometimes it's easy to judge the decisions from the outside without knowing the full complexity from the inside.
[1:26:33] And so this is where I think we're painting with too broad of a brush to say, like, even, OK, yeah, on average, kids are worse off if they got smartphones early.
[1:26:42] Well, guess what?
[1:26:43] I think irresponsible parents are more likely to give their kids smartphones early.
[1:26:47] And so we don't know how much of that effect is caused by smartphones versus smartphones.
[1:26:50] The parents who allowed that are also probably laissez-faire in other ways too.
[1:26:55] And maybe their kids are missing structure or responsibility or guidance, whatever.
[1:27:02] But that's why I want to be more specific and say, okay, let's study the features.
[1:27:06] And let's figure out which ones might be more versus less likely to be harmful.
[1:27:11] And then let's evolve the products accordingly.
[1:27:13] So we should give adults less advanced phones as well.
[1:27:16] Probably.
[1:27:17] I mean, how many people do things on their phones every day that they know are not good for them?
[1:27:24] I mean, if you go back to the dinner thing, Hugh, you raised this at the beginning.
[1:27:26] Our family dinner rule is no phones at the table, period.
[1:27:30] And what I love about it is every once in a while, somebody will walk to dinner, finishing a text or looking something up, and our kids will hold us accountable and say, no phones at the table.
[1:27:41] Especially if it's you, I'm sure.
[1:27:42] Oh, for sure.
[1:27:44] No question.
[1:27:45] I will not get away with that one.
[1:27:46] Do you think, so just back on, so we've sort of rounded out back to phones, but back on Steve Jobs, I just wonder with everything that you know about, I guess, like kindness.
[1:28:01] And we often think about legacy and how we want to be remembered.
[1:28:05] Do you think, and this is obviously different based on different people, but generally speaking, do you think Steve Jobs would rather be remembered for creating the iPhone or would he have been happier with a legacy where he was remembered as being kind?
[1:28:21] It's a great question.
[1:28:23] I think his revealed preference was kindness was not his top priority.
[1:28:27] Yeah.
[1:28:28] Yeah.
[1:28:28] I think here's what I would say.
[1:28:30] I think that there's been some research on what affects people's legacies.
[1:28:34] And it turns out that if you're somebody who was known to treat other people poorly or if you were a robber baron doing unethical things to build a business, that redemptive sequences lead to improvements in your reputation over time.
[1:28:49] And you end up with a better legacy if you end up giving all your money away, for example, if you were perceived as earning it unfairly.
[1:28:58] I think that legacy might be an ineffective motivator for a lot of people, though.
[1:29:04] I mean, how many times have you heard someone say, like, well, I won't know anyway what my legacy is?
[1:29:11] And this goes back to the control thing.
[1:29:12] I can control my decisions.
[1:29:14] I can't control how they're perceived.
[1:29:16] I think what I would rather do is ask people to reflect on the question, not how do you want to be seen or how do you want to be remembered, but...
[1:29:25] but rather what impact do you want to have on the people around you?
[1:29:30] Love that.
[1:29:31] And that I think is such an important question because obviously Steve Jobs cared about some of the people in his life and it's hard to look in the mirror and see that you're hurting people that you love.
[1:29:44] And that's the question I would rather have people wrestle with, I guess, is what's my contribution to people as opposed to what's the image that comes from that?
[1:29:55] Brilliant.
[1:29:56] It's a beautiful place.
[1:29:57] Yeah.
[1:29:58] It's a beautiful place to finish.
[1:29:59] I'm wary of your time.
[1:29:59] I know you're catching a flight soon, but it's just so, it's such a thrill to have you here.
[1:30:03] I had quite a few moments throughout the interview going, I can't believe we're sitting here with Adam Grant.
[1:30:07] It really is such a thrill.
[1:30:08] So congratulations on all the work that you're doing, your books and all the work that you continue to do.
[1:30:14] We are so grateful that you've joined us here in the Academy of Imperfection.
[1:30:18] Thank you.
[1:30:18] It's been a delight to be here.
[1:30:23] The Imperfects is hosted and produced by Hugh Van Kylenberg, Ryan Shelton and Josh Van Kylenberg.
[1:30:27] Our executive producer is Bridget North East.
[1:30:29] Researcher, Isabella North East.
[1:30:31] Sound design by Nick Van Kylenberg.
[1:30:33] This episode is filmed and edited by George Martin.
[1:30:36] The Imperfects is not a licensed mental health service and is not a substitute for professional mental health advice, treatment or assessment.
[1:30:43] The advice given in this episode is general in nature, but if you're struggling, please see a healthcare professional or call Lifeline on 13 11 14.

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