Destroy Your Mental Limits & Unlock Your Best Self - Adam Grant

what look like differences in natural ability are often differences in opportunity and motivation what does that mean well I I did write that and I think I believe it so if you look at if you look at the the history of you know of great talent we tend to see people at their Peak and we assume that they were just Naturals right Steph Curry could always drain three-pointers um Mozart was you know a natural musician and in some cases if you trace back these people were child prodigies um and Mozart I think was a great example but for every Mozart it turns out that there are multiple box and beethovens um who actually Bloom blade and took a long time to improve and I guess the the study that really open opened my eyes to this was Benjamin Bloom looked at worldclass athletes musicians scientists artists and he went back to their their childhoods and wanted to know were they were they innately just brilliant at these skills from day one um and the consistent answer was no that very often their early teachers and coaches even their own parents had no idea how great they were going to become and when they did stand out it wasn't for natural ability it was because they were unusually passionate they loved to learn um and they had early opportunities to get lots of practice in and I think what that suggests to me is that sometimes we overestimate the importance of raw talent and we underestimate the the importance of uh of creating opportunities that open doors for people and then giving them a chance to to actually showcase their enthusiasm what about motivation where does that where does that come from in in this context I think in a lot of the cases if you look at the bloom study at least um the the world-class performers tended to have an early teacher or coach who made learning fun and I think that's that's not common for a lot of us right like learning to do scales if you're a musician doing drills if you're an athlete it can be a slog and the idea that this this boring task that that might just lose your interest or might exhaust you um could actually be exciting um it draws you in and it makes you want to keep learning and and over time that becomes self-reinforcing because after all it's hard to like something that you that you just suck at right as you as you gain skill and build up Mastery that's when your motivation begins to really sore yeah when turn uh any task into or any I guess activity into a task that needs to be ticked off it sort of takes one step toward drudgery uh which just doesn't sound fun well put uh I think I wonder whether people will be uncomfortable to think about motivation as something that's almost bestowed on them by the environment because you know highly agentic meritocratic world I can make my own way I can yes but as the other part of it differences in opportunity and motivation and it seems like motivation can quite often be brought about by the right opportunity too uh it's very much out of our hands also I think that's bad news and good news I think you're right the bad news is it makes it feel like your motivation is a little bit out of your control the good news is that motivation is malleable and if you don't find it on day one from within it can actually be sparked stimulated from the outside and I think what a great coach or teacher does is they help you find your own motivation so i' I've lived this personally um I loved Sports when I was a kid and unfortunately I wasn't any good at all the ones that I I became passionate about um I love shooting Hoops I got caught from the Middle School basketball team in sixth grade seventh grade and eighth grade uh I was I was a big fan of of playing soccer or what you probably call football uh did not make my ninth grade team and the basically the last sport that I I thought to try was springboard diving um that summer my mom dragged me to a local pool and there was a lifeguard who was an All-State diver and he was doing flips and twists on his break and I watched him and I was mesmerized I wanted to learn how to do it but diving did not come naturally to me um I actually was nicknamed by my first coach Frankenstein because I was so so stiff that I couldn't even I couldn't touch my toes without bending my knees and I I actually walked like Frankenstein um and I didn't jump very high and I was not graceful at all and I didn't have much explosive power all the things that you want in diving I go to my first try out and the coach says do you want the the good news or the bad news and I say definitely the bad news and he tells me that his grandmother and his grandfather can both out jump me that you know I don't have the flexibility or explosive power or Grace that you look for in a typical diver I'm like is there good news and he says yes you know diving is a nerd sport it attracted all the people who were too short for basketball and too slow for track and too weak for football if you want to be good at this if you pour yourself into this then I think by the time you graduate from high school you're going to be an Allstate diver and that just lit a fire in me right the idea that this coach who had actually trained an Olympian by that point saw more potential in me than I saw in myself it made me want to get better and every time I hit the water and Eric gave me he'd be like Adam that was bad like how bad and he'd say I'd give that a three three and a half we'd talk about how can I get a four and how can I get a four and a half and that just made me more and more excited to learn and I ended up uh making the state finals not my senior year but my junior year and and by that point um when I graduated from high school I um I couldn't believe it I was a two two-time Junior Olympic National qualifier and I made the All-American list and I was being recruited to dive at the end AA division one level which I had no business doing but none of it would would have ever happened if Eric best didn't look at me and say Adam you're not any good today but I I believe you can be much better tomorrow it's fascinating the idea of somebody who believes that your potential is greater than you do you know it's such a beautiful idea to have for for a friend for a partner for a coach just I'm thinking about potential as an interesting concept because what do we mean when we talk about some fulfilling their potential you it's this it's kind of arbitrary right you don't know what your potential is and if you assume that people get as good as they're going to get and they don't get any better than they're going to get given that we don't get to split test the world and run it back and try harder or do more or start with a different coach or do whatever the idea of fulfilling potential everybody ultimately does fulfill their potential it's is there more potential potential that could have been fulfilled potential potential I love this idea Chris I think you know a lot of people I think experience they feel pressure around this or regret or both like I'm not living up to my potential and what they forget is the potential is not fixed right yeah you you have a floor that's determined by your current level of skill and you have a ceiling but that ceiling is not set in stone um it's dependent on changes in your skill and shifts in your motivation and the opportunities that are put in front of you and I think what what's striking to me is that what I lived as a diver is true for all of us we all have hidden potential which is a capacity for growth that might be invisible to you and it might also be invisible to some of the people around you um and you just haven't recognized it yet and I think that you know so many of us we confront people who are critics who basically attack the worst version of ourselves or cheerleaders who applaud the best version of ourselves and what we want are those coaches who see our hidden potential and help us become a better version of ourselves and so I think the question is less am I living up to my potential and more what is my hidden potential and how do I realize it yeah the compliments versus criticisms thing is super interesting to me I think uh I would identify myself as a criticism hyper responder that I waight the value of somebody who doesn't like my work significantly higher than a lot of people who do like my work and over time that can cause you to uh take more heed from people who don't have your best interests at heart as opposed to the ones that do which you know in the cold harsh light of day unemotionally is awful it's it's it's it's a poor strategy right like let's face it that's that's not optimal uh but there is there is something about that and then I guess on the other side somebody who somebody who is takes too much heed from the compliments is never going to have an accurate assessment of where the competence level is at they're not going to work on the things that they need to perhaps the basics perhaps going back to the start perhaps realizing why it is that they're failing I'm great I've never encountered any problems why why does this keep on happening to me this is unfair and maybe that's where a victim mindset comes from I'm not sure yeah I think that's right I think you're being a little too hard on yourself um when you talk about the The Perils of being a criticism junkie um which I guess it's it's unbranded right like I I'm even going to CR criticize myself for the fact that I'm too obsess respond to criticism yep correct so you're a medical permeates deeps permeates deep well I get it but I I want to defend it a little bit um I'm thinking about some research that IET fishbach did where she finds that novices are more drawn to and motivated by Praise because they need to believe that they're capable of getting better otherwise it's just too discouraging to be bad at something but that experts are more interested in criticism like okay I don't need somebody to convince me that I can be good I just want to know how I can get better and so I think that you know that that is a mark of of being somebody who's truly driven to master a craft I think where maybe you get yourself in trouble from what I'm hearing is you're not filtering out remember well let me back up as tep and say not all critics are actually thinking critically and not all critics are speaking constructively so there needs to be a finely tud and filter around you said does this person have my best interest at heart um endorsed I agree wholeheartedly with that I also want to ask does this person have credible knowledge about the domain you're trying to improve in and do they have credible knowledge about you um because somebody who doesn't know your world or doesn't know your potential um is not a good judge of of what you need to work on yeah yeah what do what do you think most people don't realize about where meaning comes from because it seems here like we're talking about this sort of grander sense of purpose something that pulls us forward it's kind of structural in the beliefs that we have and the people that are around us but it's also a little bit more Transcendent it's kind of out there so from a uh scientific perspective when it comes to Performance and potential what do people miss about meaning I think that meaning is is ultimately about mattering it's about knowing that you're valued by others and you have value to add to others and I think in a lot of cases it's pretty abstract and people don't know okay what is my contribution why do people appreciate me so I studied this early in my career I was studying um fundraising callers at the University of Michigan and they were basically calling alumni and trying to convince them to make donations and it was a hard stressful job uh you're interrupting somebody's dinner they yell at you they're like I already donated to this school it's called my tuition why are you asking me for more and I went in to to try to motivate these callers and I didn't know whether to laugh or cry when I saw this sign on the the wall that one of the callers had posted it said doing a good job here is like wetting your pants in a dark suit you get a warm feeling but no one else notices I mean talk about a crisis of meaning yeah so I design a simple experiment it takes five minutes some of the callers are randomly assigned to a five-minute interaction a month later the average caller is spending 142% more time on the phone per week and bringing in 171% more weekly Revenue so to to make that more concrete um a month later after a five-minute interaction the average caller has more than doubled in weekly phone time and nearly tripled in weekly Revenue what happened in that five minute interaction all I did was bring in one scholarship student who said because of the money you rais I am able to afford school and here's how it's changed my life and here's how I'm trying to pay it forward and all of a sudden the meaning of the work changes this job is not a job where I'm harassing people um and ruining their night it's a job where I'm enabling students to go to school um and I think that you know this is something we could probably all do more of right I think it's you know it's it's easy in a job to lose sight of what your impact is it's worth asking you know if my work didn't exist if I weren't doing this job who would be worse off and the people who come to mind they are the ones who make your work matter they're the reason that you have meaning in your job and you could apply this to any role right you could ask that question as a parent you could ask that question as a community member or a family or a friend right who'd be worse off if I weren't playing this role um that's where meaning comes from I wonder if in the world of dashboards and analytics uh and Quantified kpis I wonder if much of this particular motivating factor coming from meaning is being missed I think it is and one of the things that I I found in some follow-up experiments was it didn't help to bring in nine scholarship students um and pretty soon they were no longer stories they were statistics and I think I think you're on to something there that like the more that we try to quantify like here here are all the metrics we need you to hit the more you lose sight of well this is why I'm doing this work and you know here's here's the way that it might be if not changing other people's lives at least affecting their lives we we have like an inbound open uh email contact form on the website and uh I kind of had an intuition about this that you know numbers and stuff are all great but I really wanted to try and connect with people that listened to the show and sent nice things in so I got one of the guys to put a print off like 30 emails or something from the last few months just he chose some of them and uh he printed them off and I got to read them in bed and that was that was wild to do that you know significantly more impactful and and heartfelt and motivating and meaning generating than going oh line go up and to the right I I think that's a practice that we should all adopt and one of the questions is how often should you do it there's uh there's some research on um I'm doing random acts of kindness and also gratitude lists which suggest that daily is less effective than weekly wow why would that be the case so I think what's going on is that if you start to do a daily um it it becomes a little bit mundane and routine and also it's hard to find those examples that stop you in your tracks so you're doing your gratitude list and you're like I'm grateful for my microphone I'm grateful for my earbuds right whereas you do it weekly and you've accumulated you got some yeah you've got something worthwhile to you know to really Mark the moment um and I I think with randomax of kindness is similar um you help one person a day and it feels like just a drop in the bucket you make Thursday your generosity day and you say I'm going to help five people that day you really feel like you count it that day okay so one of the other elements here when we're talking about becoming better in in really any form is the ability to deal with uncertainty the ability to Grapple with the fact that you don't know how the outcome is going to go and that open loop is going to plague you while it's still like that and it may cause you to not even begin to take a step towards closing the loop what have you learned about becoming better at dealing with uncertainty it's hard good luck it's really hard I just studi this I don't know no I think when I think about dealing with uncertainty around progress I think I think the best thing you can do is you can get in touch with your past self so I I'll give you a personal example on this one I remember I was getting ready to launch my second book so we're going back almost a decade now and a friend called and asked me you know what I was doing to celebrate and I said nothing and she said why I said well like I'm an author like that's what we do we write books it's it's part of my routine and she said yeah but you know it's not like you write a book every day publishing a book is a milestone would are you doing to to savor that and I thought about it and I realized I had completely taken for granted the idea that like I was just going to write a book every few years and I had no sense of whether like my second book was better than my first book I had no way to gauge whether I had improved in the areas I was trying to grow and I realized that I had to do some mental time travel and think back to you know a younger earlier version of myself so I went back five years earlier And I said Okay if that version of me knew that I was going to publish one book let alone to like that would have been that would have been Nirvana that would have been a career Milestone and also that version of me would have been really impressed with the you know the progress I'd made in a couple areas that that I thought I hadn't improved at all in the short term and I think that that that's one way of managing uncertainty right is is to say okay like if a younger version of me is proud of where I am right now that is a sign that I've grown um and if if that earlier version of me isn't proud of the progress that I've made it might be time to change courses yeah it's fascinating I wonder I wonder how many people would have loved to have had themselves now as a role model when they were a kid uh and they're just totally blind to it I I think that's a beautiful way to frame it and I think that if if you are at a point where you're a great role model for your younger self um that's I think that that is a sign that you know you've not only you achieved something worth doing but you've probably you know developed a set of values um and you know demonstrated a a level of character um that you know that is worth appreciating and you know I think that in the moment it's really hard to know whether you're moving in in the right direction I think a lot of us get frustrated when when you talk about uncertainty it's frustrating to feel like well I don't have a map because the challenge I'm trying to take on um is a morphous or the goals that I'm setting you know they're they're ambitious enough that like I don't know exactly what the steps are to get from where I am today to where I want to be in the future and I think it's not realistic to have a map in a you know in a dynamic and uncertain World which what's much more plausible is to have a compass right which is to ask like is this the right Next Step does it feel directionally correct is it taking me closer to my values and my goals or is it moving me away from those um is it making me more like the people that I admire or less like them and I think that that Compass is is frankly all we need um and it's much more realistic than than the perfect map is there a line between this comfort with uncertainty and comfort with the idea of failing uh of of taking risk of being a little bit more daring I think so I think that the fear of failure stops a lot of people from from growing right what happens is you don't want to you don't want to embarrass yourself and you don't want to take a blow to your self-esteem so you basically start to keep doing the things you're already good at and over time you you become more and more concerned about making a mistake you become increasingly perfectionistic your comfort zone gets smaller um and you don't benefit from trial and error so I one of the ways that I've I've tried to navigate this recently is I actually have a goal of having three things fail every year okay how have you got on this year I've only had two so far so I I need to I need to step on the gas yeah I I don't set out trying to fail at anything let's be clear right I'm I'm not like all right let me let me take on a project that is deliberately going to bomb rather what I'm trying to do is set the expectations that if I don't have three projects fail it means that I'm not aiming high enough and I'm not stretching myself far enough and the upside of that then is that when something does Crash and Burn I can say okay that checks off one of the failures for 2024 or 2025 and I think that look we're all gonna we're all GNA fail in a few things if we are pushing ourselves and I think expecting that makes it a lot easier to stomach is not failing regularly or at least not fail not failing intermittently uh is that an indication that you could be taking a little bit more risk I think so I think if if at first you don't succeed it's it's a sign that you're you're actually Aiming High Enough and if you are you know consistently either hitting your goals or you know exceeding your expectations it probably means you could be you know pushing yourself a little bit farther or you could be at least trying something that's a little bit less familiar um and and easy for you how debilitating is failure if we encounter it versus how we feel about it when fearing it in advance I don't know if there's been any uh studies done on this the the fear of failure versus the sensation of failure the experience of failure yeah I I think you've already anticipated where my favorite research on this goes so this is Dan Gilbert and his colleagues uh group of psychologists Gilbert and Wilson I think are are are two of the best um what they show is the study was called affec of forecasting which is you make a prediction about how you're going to feel if something bad happens and then you wait for some of those bad things to happen and then you follow people and ask them how do you actually feel and most of us dramatically overestimate how much failure is going to sting and also how long that sting is going to last so one of the places where where Dan and his colleagues studied this was uh was with professors um who are about to go up for tenure and this is like this is the ultimate Gauntlet as an academic like if you succeed you get to keep your job and you also have lifetime job security if you fail you probably have to move your your reputation is in tatters um and you feel like you just couldn't cut it in your field and maybe you should choose an entirely different career and now you don't know if you'll ever have that that permanent job security so not surprisingly people think on average it's going to take five years for them to recover from that blow but within six months most people have bounced back and I think this is this is a general finding in research on resilience more broadly George Bano and his colleagues um have shown that the default response to adversity is not PTSD it's not chronic stress it's actually resilience that most people take most setbacks and stride because we have what's called a psychological immune system just like a physical immune system right our our minds generate antibodies to help us make sense Find meaning um and move forward and that doesn't mean these things don't hurt uh but it also means that we're less broken by uh by our own mistakes and setbacks than we think we are Adam mastriani says that tragedy plus time equals comedy is as close to an equation that the human brain has got that psychological immune system uh the fact as well that in advance of a you can cause yourself to ruminate so much that you're terrified of it happening but the actual pain of the thing occurring lasts for way shorter than the story that you told yourself before and the rumination that you have afterward you know so you very much are like optimizing for this microcosm Peak that isn't as high as you think and doesn't last for as long as you think and isn't as bad as you think and then even after that maybe you know 6 months a couple of years down the line you can laugh about it but uh yeah you've got this great quote that the attitude that helps most with intense stress is not mindfulness it's hope in hard times it's overwhelming to live only in the present what brings strength is anticipating a brighter future resilience lies in remembering that today's burdens may be lighter tomorrow yeah I mean look Adam would know Dan Gilbert was his mentor I love his blog experimental history and he's phenomenal dude I love that guy yeah his insights are fascinating and the writing is just so engaging and entertaining um and I you know I think this this is a fundamental truth right which is we are really bad at mental time travel so we talked about you know going backward to get in touch with your past self the other thing you can do is you can fast forward and think about your future self and what most people realize when they think about okay how much will 20 like 20 years in the future me really care about like the presentation that I'm giving tomorrow or you know the bad performance review that I got yesterday um it gives you a little bit of perspective right that distance allows you to say you know what I don't I'm probably not going to care that much and you can do it you know moving sort of back and forth between the past and the present like think about the failure that you know that you just agonized over a year ago or three years ago how often do you think about it now does it eat away at you every day for the most part the answer is no although I I just in the spirit of cander the the dive I missed my senior year state meet still bothers me occas still haunts you yeah God damn it yeah it was my best dive I can't believe I missed my front two and a half but but it's also a really good reminder that unpleasant emotions are teachable moments that that pain is there to teach me a lesson right it's like a l it's it's it's a tutorial and better preparation um it's a seminar in you know in sort of managing pressure um and the lessons that I learned missing my best dive in the biggest meat of My Life um have helped me avoid making much bigger mistakes when mistakes are much higher so bizarre that sometimes things that were the worst thing that ever happened to you in retrospect were the springboard or diving board uh that um or the kindling you know the the spark that sort of Lights something that causes you to make a change that in retrospect you was the inflection point or one of the big inflection points your entire life if it's not right I think you probably haven't done Justice to the opportunity to grow from from what went wrong you know I think that I'm a big fan of learning from success not just from failure but empirically failure is a better teacher on average than success um there's a Madson and Desai study of the orbital launch industry that I I think puts a point on this where they they they basically study like every organization that has ever launched a rocket into space over half a century and what they want to know is when when do you make a Leap Forward um in your success rate and the answer is it's after a really big fail um because you know and like a small failure you can explain it away you can move on really quickly a big failure forces you it stops you in your tracks to do the postmortem and to ask yourself okay what went wrong there and how are we going to prevent that move moving forward and I I think obviously we all need to do these when when we you know when we flop but I've become a big fan also of doing premortem which uh Gary Klein has studied so the idea of a pre premortem is you say okay we're about to make a big decision as a group or you know I've got a big choice in front of me and let's assume in the next few years with the benefit of hindsight we conclude this was an unmitigated disaster what are the most likely causes of that failure when you have that conversation upfront or when you do that reflection up front you get better at seeing around corners and anticipating what might go wrong and then you can actually prevent it from happening in the first place and I think there's there's a version of that um that's a little bit like um the opposite of what psychologists call post-traumatic growth um where you know something awful happens to you and you're not grateful that it happened but you damn well commit that you're going to grow from it well I don't think we always have to go through to get the growth right you could have pre-traumatic growth where you anticipate the things that could go horribly and then try to prepare yourself for the lessons that those events might teach you I suppose the uh danger the fear that people get stuck in who have that fear of failure is uh the premortem but without the lessons it's just ruminating on all of the things that could go wrong without using them as a well they haven't gone wrong yet and the fact that I've become aware of the fact that they might go wrong and potentially identified them and broken them down hopefully makes them less likely that they're going to this is a cause for celebration not one for concern that's the plan so in Psychology my favorite definition of worrying is attempted problem solving and I think the attempted is the part that sometimes we forget right you don't always solve your problem by worrying um but you you able to see it more clearly as you worry about it and then the goal is to make a distinction between reflection and rumination um I think for a lot of people this is a slippery slope you do the premortem you start to imagine all the things that could go wrong and then pretty soon like you're staying up all night um you know just in a in a panic in a cold sweat um that all of your fears are going to come true and I think the difference between that and reflection is in reflection you're actually having new thoughts as opposed to recycling the same old ones and so one of my heris on rumination is if you're think thinking about you know a future event that might go wrong and you haven't had a new idea for how to prevent it or address it in the last 5 to 10 minutes it is time to either move on or talk to somebody else about it um and I I like one of the things that psychologists have studied is the idea of just creating worry time Windows where you put a you know a 30 minute block on your calendar um I I do not like these right before bedtime uh but you know maybe mid-afternoon uh when you feel like you're in that post lunch food coma uh you block out a 30 minute worry time window and any worries that come to you either before that or after that you write them down and you give yourself permission to revisit them during a worry time window um and that basically clears your mental deck um to focus your attention and your energy on the things that matter um and then you figure out okay how am I how am I going to use that worry time productively is there somebody who's a good Problem Solver with me is there somebody who's good at at helping me manage my emotions um and I think that that might be the the intervention that more people ought to try that sounds like it's just for kids but actually works for adults in a lot of cases it feels like vulnerability sort of has a role to play here this uh Stark awareness of our own shortcomings I think you you talk about being secure enough in your strengths to show your weaknesses why what what's the role there of vulnerability well think we we need people to tell us how we can improve right this goes back to like let's let's turn our critics and our cheerleaders into coaches and one of the things I've found in research with constantinos cerus is a lot of people even if you ask them for feedback or for advice they do not tell you the truth they're afraid of hurting your feelings they don't want to damage the relationship it's uncomfortable and so they end up either you know biting their tongues or sugar coating and doing you a disservice they're depriving you of a chance to learn so what we found is that one of the ways you can get people to open up and and be candid with you is actually to criticize yourself out loud and say okay here's here are the things that I think I need to get better at and it feels a little vulnerable um I had a I had a leader tell tell me after I was I was describing some of the results of our experiments and and how helpful it was you know for for a boss just to say like here's the stuff I've been told I'm bad at that I'm working on uh this leader said well like I I don't want to do that because I don't want the people around me to find out what I'm bad at and I'm like I have some news for you they already know like the people in your orbit they already know what you're bad at you can't hide it from them you might as well get credit for having the self-awareness to see it and the humility and integrity to admit it out loud and that's that's one of the interesting findings in our data is that when you talk about your own shortcomings and your opportunities for improvement um you're not just claiming that you can handle the truth you're actually proving you can take it and so that gives other people the psychological safety to tell you you know the things that you may not want to hear but you actually need to hear and you don't lose anything by doing that they don't see you as less competent um they actually in some cases see it as a sign of confidence like wow you must you must be really secure um in you know what you're already good at and in your ability to grow that you're willing to talk about what you're bad at M yeah it's you had a a tweet the other day where you were talking about how people think that you save time by shortening down words but the subtext of what it actually tells people is that you just didn't care about them enough to write something out more verbatim and um this is kind of the same that on the surface maybe it feels like an admission of your shortcomings but what it actually comes across as is uh comfort and acceptance in your strengths so much so that you can talk about the things that you know that you're bad at or that you think that you need to work on so important and you know it's I think it's something that we don't do often enough and so it feels scary and it it really hurts when you know when somebody does level with us um you know if you only have a quarterly performance review or you know if if you only find out how you're letting your your partner or your spouse down like when you're in the middle of a rare nasty fight um this is the kind of thing that you never really build thick enough skin to handle and I don't want to over index on my diving experience but one of the most valuable things that happen in diving is you do 40 or 50 Dives in a practice and every single one of them you can get a score on and when you when you get 40 or 50 two and a half four five like nowhere near you you're barely cracking the upper half of the scale on that 0o to 10 in diving um no individual score really B BS you and so this is actually a habit that I've I've adopted um I do a lot of public speaking and as a shy introvert this is not something that came naturally to me at all and so early on I would get off stage and I would immediately ask anybody I encountered like what's your zero to 10 and no matter what score they gave whether they gave me a six or a three and a half I would just ask them how can I get closer to 10 and I found that very rarely Did anyone say 10 and then you know they would give me a tip or two and then I could use that and work on it to improve my score and anytime I talk to people about this they're like ah but I don't want to be scored like that that's devastating like yeah if you only do it once a year but if you're getting dozens of scores a week then it just becomes second nature and you're actually building your resilience to handle the tough scores and gaining more knowledge to avoid the tough scores why like people are are are evaluating you all the time don't you want to know what they're thinking and don't you want them to help you grow you're evaluating yourself all the time and you're also evaluating what you think other people are evaluating you on all the time you know I wonder I bet that he thinks that I did well or badly and that thing it's like put a put a score on it ask them and they can tell you yeah another great uh prompt for giving a presentation or or a talk or whatever uh and asking people for feedback because again the desirability for people to not hurt your feelings sort of holds strong typically uh is if you had to cut 20% from this talk just tell me what would you get rid of what would be top of the list what would be the because for the most part your good stuff's probably going to be good but the it's the really weak stuff that needs to go first that's what should be triaged to be thrown out oh I love that you pointed this out Chris it reminds me of ladyy clots and Gabrielle Adams's research where they show that when you ask people how to how to change um like how can I improve how can our team improve what most people do is they they add they give you more things to do and they forget that our plates are already pretty full and one of the best ways to improve something is to cut away what's not working to subtract uh to subtract and um this this sort of addition bias or addiction to to always adding things um it doesn't it doesn't help us as often as as it seems like it would and so I Lov your I love your prompt to say okay if you were going to cut 20% % like what is the fat that could be trimmed in this presentation and that creates room then for you know the the gems to actually be polished I'm thinking about the role of emotions in all of this you know so much of what we've been talking about have been strategies to compensate or ways that we see ourselves and it's this sort of degree of rationality I'm stepping out a little bit I'm sort of above looking down on the situation but the felt sense day to day is you just swimming in your own hormones and neurochemistry so what well actually I mean you you you talk about pessimism not being an effective strategy for protecting emotions that's obviously one compensatory mechanism people become cynical they try to believe that the what they they uh insulate themselves from having to feel the pain of failure by never just trying in the first place what do you think about the role of emotions and how people can uh treat them with the uh respect but objectivity that they probably need to well let let's try to bring this life what what's a what's an emotion that you often struggle to manage uh or what's a situation where you where you struggle to manage your emotions let's say worry let's say fear uh in advance of a project happening uh the concern that it's not going to go well okay give me an upcoming project that you're worried about right now three and a half thousand people on stage in London in a week and a half's Time perfect okay so what what are you afraid of specifically looking silly not performing well thinking less of myself because things don't go well um damaging my credibility uh proving critics right uh not proving myself right huh that's uh that's a pretty solid list of fears maybe you shouldn't do the talk I've sold the tickets I can't not do that why did you agree to do it in the first place it's exciting thrilling and something that in retrospect I'll be proud that I did okay and let me ask you couple other questions just to understand your perspective a little bit more how often how often have have the fears that you have come true very rarely when they have what's different about those those events h I probably haven't prepared fully or there was some unseen Factor uh that kind of came out of nowhere I was underslept I was in a bad mood um I was stressed about something uh typically the the lovely flat clear water that I was supposed to be performing in got disrupted there we go all right so I think I think there's a ton of material to work with here I think the the first thing you could do is you could say okay you know there there are things that could go wrong but there are also things that could go right let's not forget that and I think asking why did I commit to this like you you had a clear answer to that right it's exciting it's thrilling um there's some upside for you presumably in in connecting with your audience and also connecting with the new audience and and creating more opportunities for you to get your ideas out there um I think that that's got to be balanced so that's one option for emotion regulation is like okay when you're feeling anxiety it's a sign that you care about something that is beyond your control and let's let's talk about then what the things are that you can control and so you then went to preparation and so like you you are potentially a defensive pessimist somebody worries about the worst case scenario and then harnesses that anxiety as motivation to prepare uh which is which is why I think we have to we have to remember like we don't want you to be in a great mood for the next week and a half before before you get on stage because that might actually quell your anxiety prematurely and then you get complacent and you don't do the preparation necessary um and then you're more likely to you know to disappoint yourself or others um and then I think the the last thing here is like let's you know let's get some psychological distance and ask yourself okay you've been in this situation before what is the base rate of failure is actually pretty low that means you're fairly good at this and you're also mostly prepared um and so that's a reason to be confident that you're capable of you know of controlling enough to to have a high probability of success so I guess those are the range of emotion regulation strategies I would try here which ones resonate with you which ones are more of a struggle for you uh I don't actually think that I'm that driven by the fear of failure to to go and do the preparation it's maybe that was it in the beginning and this sort of goes back to what you were talking about before that people may need uh compliments at the start of their Journey but criticisms are more Salient the the further down that they get I think that a lot of people are driven they're activated by this need to prove themselves to prove their fears wrong uh but after a while at least for me uh you're just so balls deep in these habits and routines and the way that you see the world and this is how I show up and this is what my day looks like and this is how I prepare and so on and so forth so I actually think that that as a fuel is something that largely has sort of been let go of for me uh even if some of the fears still persist the motivation to fix the things that will stop the fears I think is has changed a little that makes sense and so then I think what what drives you is wanting to live up to your own standards and wanting to make sure that you don't fall short of other people's expectations of you yeah I think that would be that would probably be not far off I think that's a that's that's a reasonable way to look at it I think the other thing I would say though is like let's go back to your idea of what if you were G to cut 20% what would you cut I think one of my biggest frustrations on stage is like it's really easy to just do your greatest hits and then stagnate and so in every talk I try to do 20% new material and that's the zone of acceptable failure right I'm I'm expecting that that's that some of that content is not going to land and I I I'm like there's a there's a line drawn on that right we're not doing 50% new material because I want to make sure that 80% of of what I'm covering has been audience tested and you know is going to deliver something of value for them but the other 20% like that's my playground that's where I'm experimenting where I'm learning where often you know the most the most exciting improvisation happens um and where we take those random walks and unexpected leaps and so I wonder if like part of the way of well if another strategy for managing the fear of failure is to say like there's going to be a you know an element of you know of your performance that is more is riskier um and so like you're going to assume not everything is going to go right yeah again it comes back to that desire for control that if you're trying to do something that you've run 50,000 times before and it goes wrong it shouldn't have gone wrong so there's no acceptable play baked into the system there's no tolerance for things to be a little bit more unpredictable uh but if you do it and you say well look part of this that was the entire point of it the entire point of it was to find a little bit more playfulness I love that uh data that you talked about you said we feel worse when our negative expectations are confirmed than when our positive expectations bring disappointment a recipe per for happiness is planning for the worst while continuing to hope for the best I think that's a lovely jeros I I think it's it's something that we forget so um I'll give you another favorite equation uh from my favorite blogger this is Tim Urban who writes that happiness is reality minus expectations yep I I think that might be the single greatest line in the history of wait but why like happiness is reality minus expectations and what what that drives home for all of us and it's supported by a lot of research in Psychology is that you you if if you are disappointed um it means that you were expecting too much but wait you don't want to lower your expectations so you have a paradox here on the one hand to be successful you have to aim really high on the other hand to be satisfied you have to temper your expectations well guess what the only solution I know of to that Paradox is to have two Targets instead of one you have an aspiration which is extremely high it's the best case scenario that you're hoping for and shooting for you also have an a minimum acceptable outcome which is the if I clear this standard I will feel like it is good enough and that that creates for you this range in which like if I'm between my minimum acceptable and my aspirational um I can be happy and most of us don't do that right we either set the acceptable Target and then like I'm satisfied but I'm not growing that much and I'm not excelling or we set the ambitious goal we don't have the acceptable result and then we're successful and miserable yeah yeah one of the lines in the talk is congratulations you might be successful but you're very miserable uh and it's talking about it'sing I'm preaching to the choir here then exactly yeah it's talking we read the same stuff it seems uh yeah there's this sense that being happy is kind of unsophisticated in some ways areas of the internet that I try and stay away from but that I don't know or maybe that negativity is more refined in some way because you see the true way of the world it's sort of turning your affect into a protective strategy against appearing naive people hate to appear naive they do and I think that look there's a there's a long history of evidence that like people think that you can be brilliant but cruel um and that you know being a Critic actually makes you smarter than people who are uncritical because cynical genius illusion yeah exactly um you've been uh you've been reading Jamal Zaki I imagine recently and what what's fascinating to me about this is like these are these are completely independent qualities right you could do a very incisive thoughtful analysis of why something works and you could also do a lazy um uninformed critique of why something doesn't work and so I think we need to separate the the quality of analysis um and the depth of you know of evaluation that somebody does um from the veilance right is the is the assessment positive or negative I think one of the maybe one of the the best ways to land in this place um and I'm I'm thinking out loud here but I actually think that it should be a discipline um to if you're going to criticize something you you also have to try to create it um because like having having been in both roles um you know a diver and a diving judge um an author and a book reviewer um you know teacher and speaker and a student and an audience member one of the the overwhelming lessons from jux supposing those two hats is that criticizing is easy and creating is hard right you can Trash a book I wrote in two hours you didn't spend two years creating it and I think that you know the real test of of whether somebody is intelligent is not whether they can tear down somebody else's ideas it's whether they can build an idea of their own yeah there is this sense that people sit in the stands and throw stones and uh I don't know it feels unfair as as a person who regularly gets hit in the head by Stones uh it you know you kind of want to scream out about man in the arena and blah blah blah uh but I do think that it's important to remember it and that's you know do the people criticizing you or that have negative opinions or that you feared the Judgment of do these people have your best interests at heart and I think that's the best way to sort of sidee through all of the that you receive it's like does this person have my best interests at heart and if they do then that's a gift from them thank you for telling me this thing and if they don't it doesn't doesn't matter what they say yeah so so often people they try to remind us to listen to feedback by saying feedback is a gift and sometimes I just want to ask well where's the where's the returns department I didn't this this is not the gift that I wanted you you don't know my taste and my preferences at all I have no use for this like it's garbage but I think that pre-commit is also really helpful here so think in advance about who are the people whose whose opinions of your work and your ideas are really important to you and then seek their input and you know if they're supportive that means a lot and it you know it kind of buffers you against whatever criticism comes in and if they're not supportive you've got some work to do and you know it's coming from a place of wanting to help you yeah this uh I loved you said misery is exhausting Fosters a sense of scarcity generosity seems like a sacrifice Joy is invigorating it promotes an attitude of abundance giving feels gratifying Vitality is Kinder than Melancholy but people what is it misery loves its company that you just get used to the way that you feel and it's scary to do anything else I forgot I wrote that one bang it but yeah these these attitudes are self-fulfilling prophecies in a sense and I think like I see this all the time in my research on generosity that like people who expect the worst in others not only see the worst in others through confirmation bias they actually elicit the worst in others um and it it goes I guess it's an extension of the the cynical genius illusion like if you're cynical about other people's motives all the time you distrust them and you bring out a version of them that has their guard up and that is not willing to share their knowledge freely with you um that's not willing to open up their Network to you um you start from the assumption that you know that that most people do not want to screw you uh and suddenly like you see a Kinder um more helpful um more collaborative version of other people it feels to me like the most important skill in becoming smarter is just trying to be less dumb trying it does you know so much of the stuff from your work from other psychologists that I speak to are maybe it's not the entirety of the case but at least the first order the first meal that you're supposed to eat is avoid destruction as opposed to expedite success I I think that's accurate and I think probably what gets in the way more than anything else is what Emily Cronin has called the bias blind spot which I like to think of as the I'm not biased bias where you walk around thinking other people have you know flaws in their reasoning like other people have holes in their judgment but me I'm neutral I'm objective I see things accurately I'm rational and if you walk around believing that then that blinds you to seeing all the limitations in your own cognitive processing and the scariest thing is if if you read the research on this turns out that the higher you score in intelligence the smarter you are the more likely you are to fall victim to the I'm not bias bias because you have a lifetime of positive reinforcement of people rewarding you for being a genius and for being fast at processing information and for you know always knowing the answer and that can make you overconfident to the point of arrogant that you are now ignorant of your own ignorance and and I think it's one of the reasons why so many intelligent people fall victim to the Dunning Krueger effect like you should know better right you you should know that when you're not an expert at something you're going to overestimate on average your knowledge and skill in that area um but if you've been told for years or decades um that you are better than other people it is hard to recognize when you're actually worse yeah I uh I realized that you wrote something much more beautiful than I'd done but on the same topic about how the Hallmark of expertise is not how much you know it's how well you synthesize and I I've had this idea for a while that it's one day in sort of late 2010 there was the optimal amount of information on available to humans it only lasted a day though yes correct we had we had a scarcity we had scarcity scarcity scarcity scarcity for all of human history all the way back we knew far less than we wanted we had no idea what the weather was going to be like tomorrow and whether or not there's going to be a earthquake and and then we get to this one day is 2010 or something like that and then immediately blew through it and then we just ended up in the world that we're in now and you know um I love this idea of information foraging I'm not sure if you've come across that yeah it's so cool this analogy um they can do some sort of sort of quantitative analysis of squirrels collecting nuts in trees and then the distance from from this tree to the next tree and how many nuts are left and the squirrels have this weird sort of inventory in their mind where they say well I've reached a point where each unit of time in this tree is diminishing in terms of its nut return but and that tree based on its distance and my estimated number of nuts in that tree is this amount and then eventually it breaches the threshold and it moves from One Tree to the next tree typical squirrel cognition by the way right okay classic squirrel cognition um and I think that uh humans are the same information forages you know always on the lookout I need to find more things wouldn't this be interesting wouldn't this be interesting especially if you're sort of curiously driven and then we enter into this world where we're at a permanent 24-hour Buffet uh that is extends into eternity in all directions and we can essentially never leave uh and yes for a long time we were information scavengers and scourers and now it's much more about being Discerning it's about what what do I need to take from this and how does it tie into my bigger web of things because if you just take whatever you can get and permanently do that you're just going to be distracted distracted distracted that's profound like that that is modern wisdom personified I I think you've nailed it and and Chris I think the I think you're right there was a really limited period of time where optimal information was available and now that now now that that is clearly behind us um I think our our ability to set boundaries on what we consume right I think to raise our attentional filters and block out information that is actually redundant or overwhelming or poor quality um that is a vital skill um I think that like filtering out um is is actually in some ways more important than taking in right so um uh my colleague Dan lenthal writes a lot about absorptive capacity um which is a person or an organization's capability to take in new information um and I think we're all now drowning in information and I want to know how how finely tuned is your filter um to know what to ignore and what to avoid there there's actually now a body of research on what it's called critical ignoring which is do you have the discernment like you're talking about to know what to immediately not pay attention to or discount or dismiss and we have to do that faster and faster now as we're bombarded with more information and then I think the the other skill here just to build on the the syis Point Dan pink wrote about this I think his most preent book was a whole new mind which is now two decades ago where he argued that like in a left brain world right brainers were actually going to dominate the future and he he named a particular right brain scale that I I think now there's a premium on which he called Symphony um and it's you know it's the ability to take a bunch of different musical notes and arrange them um into you know a Harmony or a Melody um and a you know a pleasing you know I should I didn't even do this metaphor because I'm completely clueless about music but um that idea of symphony um is something now that that gets rewarded in a big way right can you not only cut through all the noise but then you know zoom in on what's really important and connect those dots in a way that other people can you know can understand and I think that you know maybe this is just a variation on your you know scavenger forager analogy but I think that it used to be the dot collectors who were rewarded like the more Stu you knew the the more impressive you were and and people saw that as a mark of expertise and now it's the dot connectors who are going to rule the world uh because they can spot the patterns that are invisible to others and then anticipate those and you know I think that means like you have to see the problems in order to solve them and in order to see the problems in a complex world uh you have to connect dots and synthesize yeah yeah it's uh it's a very odd scenario to be in you know in such a short space of time for the primary driving advantage that we were supposed to rely on to have been flipped from one thing to another thing and uh you know it doesn't surprise me that people are struggling with their attention that they're distracted a lot of the time that they feel frustrated at the fact that they can't hold on to the you go for the first time in human history we are swimming in an abundance of of information we're swimming in an abundance of food of sloth of anything you want to have an abundance of you can have it apart from like peace and uh yeah it doesn't surprise me it doesn't surprise me adaptively we're not uh built for it and culturally in terms of archetypes we don't have any tools to be able to use well this is fascinating and in some ways it takes us full circle to the beginning of our conversation because a lot of people are you know are I would say Fring that our struggles with attention are a problem of ability like people I hear people say all the time I can't focus kids do not have the capacity to pay attention anymore like they used to well guess what there's a meta analysis that came out this year looking at every study that's been done over several decades um where both kids and adults are tested on attention and it turns out that kids are no worse than they were 10 and 20 and 30 years ago and adults are actually better so we have not lost the ability to pay attention what I think is in short supply is the motivation to pay attention to your point when there are a million distractions you're not going to focus on any one thing for a long period of time like why would you read a whole book when there are lots of interesting articles on the internet um but when you find something that grabs your attention or pequs your interest Your Capacity to hold it has not been diminished one other element I really wanted to touch on was people taking satisfaction from a job well done uh I found a quote that said I still find myself with this sense that success has to be earned and the only way to earn it is to inflict pain on yourself and if you're not in pain you didn't try hard enough and it would have been better if you'd suffered more and I think that's a lie and I want to find out if it's true I think that you know I I've been doing these live shows I was in Australia recently uh and we have a Q&A portion at the end and a lot of the questions you know the most common questions how do I know that the thing that I'm doing is the right thing the path that I'm on is the right one um I struggle to feel motivated because the people around me aren't into the things that I'm into and it makes me feel lonely uh and and broken and I don't know if I'm going to end up finding a tribe that's into the new stuff and I'm tempted to go back to the old life and then the third one no matter how hard I work I really struggle to ever give myself enough uh credit um for a job well done yeah I mean this is this is a Perpetual struggle it's it seems to be especially pronounced in knowledge work where people feel like my work is never done like when when have I done enough and I think yeah I guess I'd say a couple things on this the first one is my all-time favorite experimental history piece is is the article Adam wrote on how there's a place for everyone on how to find your Niche I think it's a must read secondly um when have I done it enough um like how do I know I've made it I think there is there's there's sort of an endless like well let me let me let me try to characterize this with a with a little bit of an analogy which is I think and I'm I don't know if this is going to land or not but you can be the judge I think that um I see this a ton with my students I see them like they get into Wharton and like they now are going to have an Ivy League degree to carry with them their whole lives and what that means is every time they meet somebody who finds out where they went to college that person is going to assume they're smart or they're motivated or both and that could be enough but pretty soon like they start to worry about having the most prestigious job and they think they have to work for McKenzie or Goldman Sachs and if they don't get one of those jobs um they have failed and so then they take one of those jobs and then the question is but like did I make partner like have I been promoted to managing director and the question that I ask them is how many of those will you have to achieve like how many of those badges of Honor those merit badges will you need on your resume before you conclude that other people are going to be impressed by you like how how many times are you going to be seduced by the status of the next opportunity to say well I've got to like I've got to suffer in order to you know to reach that next Peak and at some point you're going to decide either I've done enough or it's no longer worth it and what I want to know is how do you get to that point sooner so I I had a really interesting conversation once with the author Michael Lewis um of Moneyball and The Blindside and the big short and I asked him you you know I said Michael you've you've spent your whole career studying people who achieve extraordinary success like which ones are grounded which ones know how to how to appreciate the distance they've traveled and he said I don't see a lot of humility like in the world that I you know the worlds that I occupy he said but the people who stay grounded they they have one thing in common they all have friends from when they're 10 years old and I don't know whether that's causal right maybe just the kinds of people who are inclined to be grounded are the ones who keep their friends but I've got to believe Chris that there is a component of this that sort of you know keeps you human and also makes you realize like you are pushing yourself too hard and you don't need to suffer in these ways which is your friends from 10 years old they don't value you by your achievements they don't Define your worth by your success like you're relationship predates all of that nonsense and so I think those are the best people to keep you honest and I don't think it has to be your friends from you when you were 10 I think it could be your friends from when you were eight it could be your friends from when you were 14 it might be people you've met who actually don't know anything about your career or your accomplishments or your goals and aspirations um and I think we all need those people in our Lives who value us for our character not for our success yeah I think your mom is probably uh usually a good place to look as well like what does your mom want for you in life wants you to be content and happy and she loved you whether you were number one or it didn't matter two so I think maybe maybe I mean or you have the tyrannical tiger mom that wants you to be yes true good point good point well no I was going to say there that is more common than I I would have believed there was a there's a makeing careing common study where you ask parents what they want most for their kids and most parents say I want my kid to be happy and kind then you ask their children what do your parents want for you and their kids think that achievement is number one that their success matters more to their parents than their happiness or their kindness and I I think I I don't I don't believe by the way that the kids are right per se or the parents are right I think that what happens is parents want all of these things we want our kids to be successful and happy and kind and we think that you know if they're success ful they're going to be happier which is obviously not always true um we think that success is going to allow them to do more for others maybe maybe not what happens though is that parents only end up talking about achievement or they primarily talk about achievement yep like how how many dinner table conversations are what grade did you get on the test how many goals did you score in the in the game and when you do that you send an implicit message that what matters above all else is what your kids accomplish and so one of one of the ways that my wife Allison and I have tried to tried to change that equation is we ask our kids every week who did you help this week and who helped you and we're trying to to make it really clear to them we we don't just want you to be successful we want you to care about others we want you to be givers not takers and we want you to pay attention to which kids in your class you know not just who are the popular kids or the cool kids but who are the kind and caring kids and when you notice who helped you um you realize who are the people who have others best interest at heart and I think we need to have more of those kinds of conversations with people um not just with kids probably with adults too because we convey what we value through what we pay attention to I love it Adam Grant ladies and gentlemen Adam where should people go they want to keep up to date with all of your work online oh I I guess I don't know Adam grant. net uh if a a substack newsletter and a bunch of Assessments you can take uh to gauge your generosity uh your mental flexibility uh your hidden potential uh and I guess also uh rethinking I host a podcast where I try to explore new thoughts and new ways of thinking dude I appreciate you I love the fact that you're uh really kneee in all of the literature and all of the research uh it's in the job description is literally it's what I know yeah but I I love I love how much research you read for fun clearly and also how practical you make it trying to man trying to bridge that Gap dude I really love this I've been looking forward to bringing you on for a long time and uh whenever the next books out I'd love to bring you back on as well well I'm honored to be here I would love to know give me give me your 0o to 10 and what I can do better as a guest uh you're a pro at this get the headphones to work before we start um that that was that was the biggest one what would be better if it was 20% of anything uh honestly dude you know the the citing the studies uh very quickly moving through them not lingering in the boring referenc Parts explaining this happened and just giving people enough of a reference is really really great uh the personal anecdotes also fantastic maybe just a tiny maybe just a tiny little bit more in terms of the Tactical side but we even got a lot of that you did awesome so I'll uh I'll have to reflect and I'll I'll I'll I'll email you I'll email you afterward but bro I I've Lov this I've been wanting to bring you on literally for years and um yeah you're fantastic your work's brilliant your even your Instagram and your Twitter are like high signal places to be so I'm very glad that we managed to uh finally find a time well I really appreciate that and it's a lot of pressure to live up live up to now I think I think I feel like I could have been a little punchier on a couple of the questions particularly the opening question and I I think some of the most interesting parts of the conversation were like kind of you you sharing a perspective or an experience and then us riffing on that and so I think one of my notes for me is I need to I need to be off kind of my usual topics enough that the information foraging idea comes up that the like okay well what are you what are you worried about failing at comes up because I I think those moments of like let let's play with an idea together or let's think about you know a problem to solve or uh like what what would the the concrete action set be in this situation I feel like those those are the moments that crackle and um I think we had a number of great ones I'm like oh now in retrospect we could have had more of that damn it I'm looking forward to the next conversation me too man me too let's uh let's not leave it quite so long look I'll uh I love you and leave you thank you so much for a day dude do you think that your algorithm on YouTube is a bit of a God is it able to know things about you that you don't know about yourself well the YouTube gods have selected this episode specifically for you bespoke so go on go and check it out