Adam Grant

I'm grateful for my earbuds, right? Whereas you do it weekly and you've accumulated- You've got some shit. Yeah. You've got something worthwhile to really mark the moment. And I think with random acts of kindness, it's similar. You help one person a day and it feels like just a drop in the bucket. You make Thursday your generosity day and you say, I'm going to help five people that day.

You really feel like you counted that day.

I just study this. I don't know. No, I think when I think about dealing with uncertainty around progress, I think the best thing you can do is you can get in touch with your past self. So I'll give you a personal example on this one. I remember I was getting ready to launch my second book. So we're going back almost a decade now. And a friend called and asked me what I was doing to celebrate.

I think in a lot of the cases, if you look at the Bloom study at least, the world-class performers tended to have an early teacher or coach who made learning fun. And I think 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 I said, nothing. And she said, why? I said, well, I'm an author. That's what we do. We write books. It's part of my routine. And she said, yeah, but it's not like you write a book every day. Publishing a book is a milestone. What are you doing to savor that? And I thought about it and I realized I had completely taken for granted the idea that I was just going to write a book every few years.

And I had no sense of whether my second book was better than my first book. I had no way to gauge whether I had improved in the areas I was trying to grow. And I realized that I had to do some mental time travel and think back to a younger, earlier version of myself.

So I went back five years earlier and I said, okay, if that version of me knew that I was going to publish one book, let alone two, 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 progress I'd made in a couple areas 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 think that's a beautiful way to frame it. And I think that if you are at a point where you're a great role model for your younger self, I think that is a sign that you've not only achieved something worth doing, but you've probably developed a set of values and demonstrated a level of character that is worth appreciating. And

I think that in the moment, it's really hard to know whether you're moving in the right direction. I think a lot of us get frustrated when you talk about uncertainty.

It's frustrating to feel like, well, I don't have a map because the challenge I'm trying to take on is amorphous or the goals that I'm setting, they're ambitious enough that I don't know exactly what the steps are to get from where I am today to where I want to be in the future. And I think it's not realistic to have a map in a dynamic and uncertain world.

And the idea that this boring task that might just lose your interest or might exhaust you could actually be exciting, it draws you in and it makes you wanna keep learning. And over time that becomes self-reinforcing because after all, it's hard to like something that you just suck at. As you gain skill and build up mastery, that's when your motivation begins to really soar.

What's much more plausible is to have a compass. which is to ask, is this the right next step? Does it feel directionally correct? Is it taking me closer to my values and my goals? Or is it moving me away from those? Is it making me more like the people that I admire or less like them? And I think that compass is frankly all we need. And it's much more realistic than the perfect map.

I think that the fear of failure stops a lot of people from growing, right? What happens is you don't want to embarrass yourself and you don't want to take a blow to your self-esteem. So you basically start to keep doing the things you're already good at. And over time, you become more and more concerned about making a mistake. You become increasingly perfectionistic.

Your comfort zone gets smaller and you don't benefit from trial and error. So one of the ways that I've tried to navigate this recently is I actually have a goal of having three things fail every year. Okay. How have you gotten this year? I've only had two so far, so I need to step on the gas. I don't set out trying to fail at anything. Let's be clear, right?

I'm not like, all right, let me take on a project that is deliberately going to bomb. Rather, what I'm trying to do is set the expectation that if I don't have three projects fail, it means that I'm not aiming high enough and I'm not stretching myself far enough.

And the upside of that then is that when something does crash and burn, I can say, okay, that checks off one of the failures for 2024 or 2025. And I think that, look, we're all going to fail in a few things if we are pushing ourselves. And I think expecting that makes it a lot easier to stomach.

I think if at first you don't succeed, it's a sign that you're actually aiming high enough. And if you are consistently either hitting your goals or exceeding your expectations, it probably means you could be pushing yourself a little bit farther, or you could be at least trying something that's a little bit less familiar and easy for you.

Yeah, I think you've already anticipated where my favorite research on this goes. So this is Dan Gilbert and his colleagues, a group of psychologists, Gilbert and Wilson, I think are two of the best. What they show is they study what's called affective forecasting. which is you make a prediction about how you're going to feel if something bad happens.

And then you wait for some of those bad things to happen. And then you follow people and ask them, how do you actually feel? And most of us dramatically overestimate how much failure is going to sting and also how long that sting is going to last. So one of the places where Dan and his colleagues studied this was with professors who are about to go up for tenure.

And this is the ultimate gauntlet as an academic. If you succeed, you get to keep your job and you also have lifetime job security. If you fail, you probably have to move Your reputation is in tatters and you feel like you just couldn't cut it in your field and maybe you should choose an entirely different career. And now you don't know if you'll ever have that permanent job security.

So not surprisingly, people think on average, it's going to take five years for them to recover from that blow. But within six months, most people have bounced back. And I think this is a general finding in research on resilience more broadly. George Bonanno and his colleagues have shown that the default response to adversity is not PTSD. It's not chronic stress. It's actually resilience.

That most people take most setbacks in stride because we have what's called a psychological immune system. Just like a physical immune system, our minds generate antibodies to help us make sense, find meaning, and move forward. And that doesn't mean these things don't hurt. But it also means that we're less broken by our own mistakes and setbacks than we think we are.

Yeah, I mean, look, Adam would know. Dan Gilbert was his mentor. I love his blog, Experimental History. He's phenomenal, dude. I love that guy. Yeah, his insights are fascinating and the writing is just so engaging and entertaining. And I think this is a fundamental truth, right? Which is we are really bad at mental time travel.

So we talked about 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 years in the future me really care about the presentation that I'm giving tomorrow?

or the bad performance review that I got yesterday, it gives you a little bit of perspective, right? That distance allows you to say, you know what? I'm probably not going to care that much. And you can do it moving sort of back and forth between the past and the present. Think about the failure that you just agonized over a year ago or three years ago. How often do you think about it now?

Does it eat away at you every day? For the most part, the answer is no. Although just in the spirit of candor, the dive I missed my senior year state meet still bothers me occasionally. Still haunts you? Yeah. God damn it. It was my best dive. I can't believe I missed my front two and a half. But it's also a really good reminder that unpleasant emotions are teachable moments.

That pain is there to teach me a lesson. It's a tutorial in better preparation. It's a seminar in managing pressure. And the lessons that I learned missing my best dive in the biggest meet of my life have helped me avoid making much bigger mistakes when the stakes are much higher.

If it's not, I think you probably haven't done justice to the opportunity to grow from what went wrong. I think that... I'm a big fan of learning from success, not just from failure, but empirically failure is a better teacher on average than success.

There's a Madsen and Desai study of the orbital launch industry that I think puts a point on this where they basically study every organization that has ever launched a rocket into space over half a century. And what they want to know is, when do you make a leap forward in your success rate? And the answer is, it's after a really big fail. Because 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, OK, what went wrong there? And how are we going to prevent that moving forward? And I think, obviously, we all need to do these when we flop. But I've become a big fan also of doing premortems, which Gary Klein has studied.

So the idea of a premortem is you say, okay, we're about to make a big decision as a group, or 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 upfront, you get better at seeing around corners and anticipating what might go wrong. And then you can actually prevent it from happening in the first place.

And I think there's a version of that that's a little bit like the opposite of what psychologists call post-traumatic growth, where something awful happens to you and you're not grateful that it happened, but you damn well commit that you're gonna grow from it. Well, I don't think we always have to go through trauma 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.

So in psychology, my favorite definition of worrying is attempted problem solving. And I think the attempted is the part that sometimes we forget, right? You don't always solve your problem by worrying, but you are able to see it more clearly as you worry about it. And then the goal is to make a distinction between reflection and rumination. I think for a lot of people, this is a slippery slope.

I think that's bad news. I loved sports when I was a kid. And unfortunately, I wasn't any good at all the ones that I became passionate about. I love shooting hoops. I got caught from middle school basketball team in sixth grade, seventh grade and eighth grade. I was I was a big fan of playing soccer or what you probably call football did not make my ninth grade team.

You do the premortem, you start to imagine all the things that could go wrong, and then pretty soon you're staying up all night just in a panic, in a cold sweat that all of your fears are going to come true. And I think the difference between that and reflection is in reflection, you're actually having new thoughts as opposed to recycling the same old ones.

And so one of my heuristics on rumination is if you're thinking about a future event that might go wrong and you haven't had a new idea for how to prevent it or address it in the last five to 10 minutes, It is time to either move on or talk to somebody else about it. And I like one of the things that psychologists have studied is the idea of just creating worry time windows.

where you put a 30-minute block on your calendar. I do not like these right before bedtime, but maybe mid-afternoon when you feel like you're in that post-lunch food coma, you block out a 30-minute worry time window. And any worries that come to you either before that or after that, you write them down and you give yourself permission to revisit them during a worry time window.

And that basically clears your mental deck to focus your attention and your energy on the things that matter. And then you figure out, okay, how am I going to use that worry time productively? Is there somebody who's a good problem solver with me? Is there somebody who's good at helping me manage my emotions?

And I think that might be the intervention that more people ought to try that sounds like it's just for kids, but actually works for adults in a lot of cases.

Well, I think we need people to tell us how we can improve, right? This goes back to like, let's turn our critics and our cheerleaders into coaches. And one of the things I've found in research with Constantinos Koutiferos is a lot of people, even if you ask them for feedback or for advice, they do not tell you the truth. They're afraid of hurting your feelings.

They don't want to damage the relationship. It's uncomfortable. And so they end up either biting their tongues or sugarcoating. And they're doing you a disservice. They're depriving you of a chance to learn.

So what we found is that one of the ways you can get people to open up and be candid with you is actually to criticize yourself out loud and say, okay, here are the things that I think I need to get better at. And it feels a little vulnerable.

I had a leader tell me after I was describing some of the results of our experiments and how helpful it was for a boss just to say, here's the stuff I've been told I'm bad at that I'm working on. This leader said, well, I don't want to do that because I don't want the people around me to find out what I'm bad at. And I'm like, I have some news for you.

The people in your orbit, they already know what you're bad at. You can't hide it from them. You might as well get credit for having the self-awareness to see it and the humility and integrity to admit it out loud.

And that's one of the interesting findings in our data is that when you talk about your own shortcomings and your opportunities for improvement, you're not just claiming that you can handle the truth. You're actually proving you can take it. And so that gives other people the psychological safety to tell you the things that you may not want to hear, but you actually need to hear.

You don't lose anything by doing that. They don't see you as less competent. They actually, in some cases, see it as a sign of confidence. Like, wow, you must be really secure in what you're already good at and in your ability to grow that you're willing to talk about what you're bad at.

And I think it's something that we don't do often enough. And so it feels scary and it really hurts when somebody does level with us. If you only have a quarterly performance review, or if you only find out how you're letting your partner or your spouse down when you're in the middle of a rare, nasty fight, this is the kind of thing that you never really build thick enough skin to handle. Yeah.

I don't want to over-index on my diving experience, but one of the most valuable things that happened in diving is you do 40 or 50 dives in a practice and every single one of them you can get a score on. And when you get 40 or 50, two and a half, four, five, nowhere near, you're barely cracking the upper half of the scale on that zero to 10 in diving. No individual score really bothers you.

And so this is actually a habit that I've adopted. I do a lot of public speaking. And as a shy introvert, this is not something that came naturally to me at all. And so early on, I would get off stage and I would immediately ask anybody I encountered, 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 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.

That's devastating. 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. People 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?

And basically the last sport that I thought to try was springboard diving. That summer, my mom dragged me to a local pool and there was a lifeguard who was an all-state diver. And he was doing flips and twists on his break. And I watched him and I was mesmerized. I wanted to learn how to do it. But diving did not come naturally to me.

Oh, I love that you pointed this out, Chris. It reminds me of Lady Klotz and Gabrielle Adams' research where they show that when you ask people how to change, like, how can I improve? How can our team improve? What most people do is they add. They give you more things to do. And they forget that our plates are already pretty full.

And one of the best ways to improve something is to cut away what's not working, to subtract. And this sort of addition bias or addiction to always adding things, it doesn't help us as often as it seems like it would. And so I love your prompt to say, okay, if you were going to cut 20%, like, what is the fat that could be trimmed in this presentation?

And that creates room then for the gems to actually be polished.

Well, let's try to bring this to life. What's an emotion that you often struggle to manage? Or what's a situation where you struggle to manage your emotions?

Perfect.

Huh, that's a pretty solid list of fears.

Why did you agree to do it in the first place?

And let me ask you a couple other questions just to understand your perspective a little bit more. How often have the fears that you have come true?

I actually was nicknamed by my first coach, Frankenstein, because I was so stiff that I couldn't even, I couldn't touch my toes without bending my knees. And I actually walked like Frankenstein. 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.

um mozart was you know a natural musician and in some cases if you trace back these people were child prodigies and mozart i think was a great example but for every mozart it turns out that there are multiple bachs and beethovens who actually bloomed late and took a long time to improve

All right. So 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, there are things that could go wrong, but there are also things that could go right. Let's not forget that. And I think asking, why did I commit to this? You had a clear answer to that, right? It's exciting. It's thrilling.

There's some upside for you, presumably, in connecting with your audience and also connecting with a new audience and creating more opportunities for you to get your ideas out there. I think that's got to be balanced. So that's one option for emotion regulation is, okay, when you're feeling anxiety, it's a sign that you care about something that is beyond your control.

And let's talk about then what the things are that you can control. And so you then went to preparation. And so you are potentially a defensive pessimist, somebody who worries about the worst case scenario and then harnesses that anxiety as motivation to prepare.

which is why I think we have to remember, we don't want you to be in a great mood for the next week and a half before you get on stage because that might actually quell your anxiety prematurely and then you get complacent and you don't do the preparation necessary and then you're more likely to disappoint yourself or others.

And then I think the last thing here is let's get some psychological distance and ask yourself, okay, you've been in this situation before. What is the base rate of failure? It's actually pretty low. That means you're fairly good at this and you're also mostly prepared. And so that's a reason to be confident that you're capable of controlling enough 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?

I go to my first tryout and the coach says, do you want 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 outjump 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.

That makes sense. And so then I think 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.

Let's go back to your idea of if you were going to cut 20%, what would you cut? I think one of my biggest frustrations on stage is 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. I'm expecting that some of that content is not going to land. And there's a line drawn on that, right?

We're not doing 50% new material because I want to make sure that 80% of what I'm covering has been audience tested and is going to deliver something of value for them. But the other 20%, that's my playground. That's where I'm experimenting, where I'm learning, where often the most exciting improvisation happens and where we take those random walks and unexpected leaps. And so

I wonder if part of the way of another strategy for managing the fear of failure is to say there's going to be an element of your performance that is riskier. And so you're going to assume not everything is going to go right.

I think it's something that we forget. So I'll give you another favorite equation from my favorite blogger. This is Tim Urban, who writes that happiness is reality minus expectations. Yep. I think that might be the single greatest line in the history of Wait But Why. Happiness is reality minus expectations.

And what that drives home for all of us, and it's supported by a lot of research in psychology, is that if you are disappointed, it means that you 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.

It attracted all the people who are too short for basketball and too slow for track and too weak for football. if you want to be good at this, if you pour yourself into this, then I think by the time you graduate from high school, you're going to be an all-state diver. And that just lit a fire in me, right?

Well, guess what? The only solution I know of to that paradox is 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 a minimum acceptable outcome, which is the, if I clear this standard, I will feel like it is good enough.

And that creates for you this range in which, if I'm between my minimum acceptable and my aspirational, I can be happy. And most of us don't do that, right? We either set the acceptable target and then I'm satisfied, but I'm not growing that much and I'm not excelling. Or we set the ambitious goal. We don't have the acceptable result. And then we're successful and miserable.

They do. And I think that, look, there's a long history of evidence that people think that you can be brilliant, but cruel. And that, you know, being a critic actually makes you smarter than people who are uncritical because... Cynical genius illusion. Yeah, exactly. You've been reading Jameel Zaki, I imagine, recently. And what's fascinating to me about this is...

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, uninformed critique of why something doesn't work. And so I think we need to separate the quality of analysis and the depth of evaluation that somebody does from the valence, right? Is the assessment positive or negative?

I think maybe one of the best ways to land in this place, and I'm thinking out loud here, but I actually think that it should be a discipline. If you're going to criticize something, you also have to try to create it.

The idea that this coach who had actually trained an Olympian by that point saw more potential in me than I saw in myself. It made me want to get better. And every time I hit the water and Eric gave me, he'd be like, Adam, that was bad. How bad? And he'd say, 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?

Because having been in both roles, a diver and a diving judge, an author and a book reviewer, a teacher and speaker and a student and an audience member, one of the overwhelming lessons from juxtaposing those two hats is that criticizing is easy and creating is hard. You can trash a book I wrote in two hours. You didn't spend two years creating it.

And I think that the real test of whether somebody is intelligent is not whether they can tear down somebody else's ideas. It's whether they can build an idea of their own.

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, like, Where's the returns department? This is not the gift that I wanted. You don't know my taste and my preferences at all. I have no use for this. It's garbage. But I think that pre-committing is also really helpful here.

So think in advance about who are the people whose opinions of your work and your ideas are really important to you. And then seek their input. And if they're supportive, that means a lot. And it kind of buffers you against whatever criticism comes in. And if they're not supportive, you've got some work to do. And you know it's coming from a place of wanting to help you.

Bang it. And I guess it's an extension of the cynical genius illusion. If you're cynical about other people's motives all the time, you distrust them and you bring out a version of them that has their guard up and that is not willing to share their knowledge freely with you, that's not willing to open up their network to you. You start from the assumption that most people do not want to screw you.

And suddenly, like you see a kinder, more helpful, more collaborative version of other people.

And that just made me more and more excited to learn. And I ended up making the state finals, not my senior year, but my junior year. And by that point, when I graduated from high school, I couldn't believe it. I was a two-time junior Olympic national qualifier.

I think that's accurate. And I think probably what gets in the way more than anything else is what Emily Cronin has called the bias blind spot, which I like to think of as the, I'm not biased bias where you walk around thinking other people have flaws in their reasoning. Other people have holes in their judgment, but me, I'm neutral. I'm objective. I see things accurately. I'm rational. And,

If you walk around believing that, then that blinds you to seeing all the limitations in your own cognitive processing.

And the scariest thing is, if you read the research on this, turns out that the higher you score in intelligence, the smarter you are, the more likely you are to fall victim to the I'm not bias bias, because you have a lifetime of positive reinforcement of people rewarding you for being a genius and for being fast at processing information and for always knowing the answer.

And that can make you overconfident to the point of arrogant that you are now ignorant of your own ignorance. And I think it's one of the reasons why so many intelligent people fall victim to the Dunning-Kruger effect. You should know better. You should know that when you're not an expert at something, you're going to overestimate, on average, your knowledge and skill in that area. But...

If you've been told for years or decades that you are better than other people, it is hard to recognize when you're actually worse.

available to humans.

And I made the All-American list, and I was being recruited to dive at the NCAA Division I level, which I had no business doing, but none of it would have ever happened if Eric Best didn't look at me and say, Adam, you're not any good today, but I believe you can be much better tomorrow.

That's profound. Like that is modern wisdom personified. I think you've nailed it. And Chris, I think you're right. There was a really limited period of time where optimal information was available. And now that that is clearly behind us, I think our ability to set boundaries on what we consume, right?

I think to raise our attentional filters and block out information that is actually redundant or overwhelming or poor quality, that is a vital skill. I think that filtering out is actually in some ways more important than taking in, right? So my colleague Dan Leventhal writes a lot about absorptive capacity, which is a person or an organization's capability to take in new information.

And I think we're all now drowning in information. And I want to know how finely tuned is your filter to know what to ignore and what to avoid. There's actually now a body of research on what's called critical ignoring, which is, do you have the discernment like you're talking about to know what to immediately not pay attention to or discount or dismiss?

And we have to do that faster and faster now as we're bombarded with more information. And then I think the other skill here, just to build on the synthesis point, Dan Pink wrote about this. I think his most prescient book was A Whole New Mind, which is now two decades ago, where he argued that in a left brain world, right brainers were actually going to dominate the future.

And he named a particular right brain skill that I think now there's a premium on, which he called symphony. And it's, you know, it's the ability to take a bunch of different musical notes and arrange them into, you know, a harmony or a melody and a, you know, a pleasing, you know, I shouldn't even do this metaphor because I'm completely clueless about music, but yeah.

That idea of symphony is something now that gets rewarded in a big way, right? Can you not only cut through all the noise, but then zoom in on what's really important and connect those dots in a way that other people can understand? And I think that maybe this is just a variation on your scavenger forager analogy, but I think that it used to be the dot collectors who were rewarded.

Like the more stuff you knew, the more impressive you were. And people saw that as a mark of expertise. And now it's the dot connectors who are going to rule the world because they can spot the patterns that are invisible to others and then anticipate those. And I think that means you have to see the problems in order to solve them.

And in order to see the problems in a complex world, you have to connect dots and synthesize. Yeah.

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, I would say, fretting that our struggles with attention are a problem of ability. 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 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. Why would you read a whole book when there are lots of interesting articles on the internet? But when you find something that grabs your attention or piques your interest, your capacity to hold it has not been diminished.

Yeah. I mean, this is a perpetual struggle. It seems to be especially pronounced in knowledge work where people feel like my work is never done. When have I done enough? Yeah. And I think, yeah, I guess I'd say a couple things on this. The first one is my all-time favorite experimental history piece is the article Adam wrote on how there's a place for everyone on how to find your niche.

I think it's a must read. Secondly, when have I done it enough? Like, how do I know I've made it? I think there is... There's sort of an endless... Well, let me try to characterize this with a little bit of an analogy, which is... I think... I don't know if this is going to land or not, but you can be the judge. I think that... I see this a ton with my students.

I see them, they get into Wharton and 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, they start to worry about having the most prestigious job.

And they think they have to work for McKinsey or Goldman Sachs. And if they don't get one of those jobs, they have failed. And so then they take one of those jobs. And then the question is, but did I make partner? Have I been promoted to managing director? And the question that I ask them is, how many of those will you have to achieve?

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? How many times are you going to be seduced by the status of the next opportunity to say, well, I've got to suffer in order to reach that next peak? And at some point, you're going to decide either I've done enough or it's no longer worth it.

And what I want to know is how do you get to that point sooner? So I had a really interesting conversation once with the author Michael Lewis of Moneyball and The Blind Side and The Big Short. And I asked him, I said, Michael, you've spent your whole career studying people who achieve extraordinary success. Which ones are grounded? Which ones know how to appreciate the distance they've traveled?

And he said, I don't see a lot of humility in the world that I occupy. He said, but the people who stay grounded, they have one thing in common. They all have friends from when they're 10 years old. And I don't know whether that's causal, right? Maybe just the kinds of people who are inclined to be grounded are the ones who keep their friends.

I love this idea, Chris. I think, you know, a lot of people, I think, experience, they feel pressure around this or regret or both. Like, I'm not living up to my potential. And what they forget is that potential is not fixed. Right. Yeah. You 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.

But I've got to believe, Chris, that there is a component of this that sort of keeps you human and also makes you realize you are pushing yourself too hard and you don't need to suffer in these ways, which is your friends from 10 years old, they don't value you by your achievements. They don't define your worth by your success. Like your relationship predates all of that nonsense.

And so I think those are the best people to keep you honest. And I don't think it has to be your friends from when you were 10. I think it could be your friends from when you were eight. It could be your friends from when you were 14. It might be people you've met who actually don't know anything about your career or your accomplishments or your goals and aspirations.

And I think we all need those people in our lives who value us for our character, not for our success.

Maybe.

Well, no, I was going to say that that is more common than I would have believed. There was a, there's a making caring common study where you ask parents what they want most for their kids. And most parents say, I want my kid to be happy and kind. Then you ask their children, what do your parents want for you?

And their kids think that achievement is number one, that their success matters more to their parents than their happiness or their kindness. And I 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 successful, they're going to be happier, which is obviously not always true. We think that success is going to allow them to do more for others. Maybe, maybe not. What happens though, is that parents only end up talking about achievement or they primarily talk about achievement. Yep.

Like how many dinner table conversations are, what grade did you get on the test? How many goals did you score in the game? And when you do that, you send an implicit message that what matters above all else is what your kids accomplish. And so one of the ways that my wife Allison and I have tried to change that equation is we ask our kids every week, who did you help this week and who helped you?

And we're trying to make it really clear to them. We don't just want you to be successful. We want you to care about others. We want you to be givers, not takers. And we want you to pay attention to which kids in your class, you know, not just who are the popular kids or the cool kids, but who are the kind and caring kids.

And when you notice who helped you, you realize who are the people who have others' best interests at heart. And I think we need to have more of those kinds of conversations with people, not just with kids, probably with adults too, because we convey what we value through what we pay attention to.

Oh, I guess, I don't know, adamgrant.net. I have a Substack newsletter and a bunch of assessments you can take to gauge your generosity, your mental flexibility, your hidden potential. And I guess also rethinking. I host a podcast where I try to explore new thoughts and new ways of thinking.

It's dependent on changes in your skill and shifts in your motivation and the opportunities that are put in front of you. And I think what's striking to me is that what I lived as a diver is true for all of us. We all have hidden potential, which is a capacity for growth that might be invisible to you. And it might also be invisible to some of the people around you.

It's literally, it's what I know. Yeah, yeah. But 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.

Well, I'm honored to be here. I would love to know. Give me your zero to 10 and what I can do better as a guest.

Well, I really appreciate that. And it's a lot of pressure to live up to now. I think I feel like I could have been a little punchier on a couple of the questions, particularly the opening question. And I think some of the most interesting parts of the conversation were kind of 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?

Damn it.

I'm looking forward to the next conversation.

and you just haven't recognized it yet. And I think that 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 I guess the study that really opened my eyes to this was Benjamin Bloom looked at world-class athletes, musicians, scientists, artists, and he went back to their childhoods and wanted to know, were they innately just brilliant at these skills from day one? And the consistent answer was no.

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, I think that's right. I think you're being a little too hard on yourself when you talk about the perils of being a criticism junkie, which I guess it's on brand, right? I'm even going to criticize myself for the fact that I'm too obsessed. Respond to criticism.

Correct.

Well, I get it, but I want to defend it a little bit. I'm thinking about some research that Ayelet Fischbach 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 is a mark of being somebody who's truly driven to master a craft. I think where maybe you get yourself in trouble from what I'm hearing is you're not filtering out.

Well, let me back up a step and say, not all critics are actually thinking critically, right? And not all critics are speaking constructively. So there needs to be a finely tuned filter around, you said, does this person have my best interests at heart? Endorse. 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? Because somebody who doesn't know your world or doesn't know your potential is not a good judge of what you need to work on. Yeah, yeah.

I think that meaning is ultimately about mattering. It's about knowing that you're valued by others and you have value to add to others. And I think in a lot of cases, it's pretty abstract. And people don't really know, OK, what is my contribution? Why do people appreciate me? So I studied this early in my career. I was studying fundraising callers at the University of Michigan.

And they were basically calling alumni and trying to convince them to make donations. And it was a hard, stressful job. You're interrupting somebody's dinner. They yell at you. They're like, I already donated to this school. It's called my tuition. Why are you asking me for more?

Well, I did write that, and I think I believe it. So if you look at the history of great talent, we tend to see people at their peak, and we assume that they were just naturals. Steph Curry could always drain three-pointers.

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 love to learn. And they had early opportunities to get lots of practice in.

And I went in to try to motivate these callers and I didn't know whether to laugh or cry when I saw this sign on the wall that one of the callers had posted. It said, doing a good job here is like wetting your pants in a dark suit. You get a warm feeling, but no one else notices. Yeah. I mean, talk about a crisis of meaning. Yeah. So I designed a simple experiment. It takes five minutes.

Some of the callers are randomly assigned to a five-minute interaction. A month later, the average caller is spending 142% more time on the phone per week and bringing in 171% more weekly revenue. So to make that more concrete, a month later after a five-minute interaction, the average caller has more than doubled in weekly phone time and nearly tripled in weekly revenue.

What happened in that five-minute interaction? All I did was bring in one scholarship student who said, because of the money you raise, I am able to afford school. And here's how it's changed my life. And here's how I'm trying to pay it forward. And all of a sudden, the meaning of the work changes. This job is not a job where I'm harassing people and ruining their night.

It's a job where I'm enabling students to go to school. And I think that this is something we could probably all do more of. I think it's easy in a job to lose sight of what your impact is. It's worth asking, if my work didn't exist, if I weren't doing this job, who would be worse off? And the people who come to mind, they are the ones who make your work matter.

They're the reason that you have meaning in your job. And you can 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 would be worse off if I weren't playing this role? That's where meaning comes from.

I think it is. And one of the things that I found in some follow-up experiments was it didn't help to bring in nine scholarship students. And pretty soon, they were no longer stories. They were statistics. And I think you're onto something there that the more that we try to quantify... 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 I think what that suggests to me is that sometimes we overestimate the importance of raw talent and we underestimate the importance of creating opportunities that open doors for people and then giving them a chance to actually showcase their enthusiasm.

And here's the way that it might be, if not changing other people's lives, at least affecting their lives.

I think that's a practice that we should all adopt. And one of the questions is, how often should you do it? There's some research on doing random acts of kindness and also gratitude lists, which suggests that daily is less effective than weekly. Wow. Why would that be the case? So I think what's going on is that if you start to do it daily, it becomes a little bit mundane and routine.

And also, it's hard to find those examples that stop you in your tracks. So you're doing your gratitude list and you're like, I'm grateful for my microphone.

I think that's the friendliest threat I've ever heard.

Well, let's talk about some of your lessons around using this power for good. First of all, tell me why shaming doesn't work.

Hey everyone, it's Adam Grant. Welcome back to Rethinking, my podcast on the science of what makes us tick with the TED Audio Collective. I'm an organizational psychologist and I'm taking you inside the minds of fascinating people to explore new thoughts and new ways of thinking. Mein Gast heute ist Loretta Ross, öffentlich-intellektuelle Aktivistin und Professorin an der Smith College.

Obviously, my heart broke reading those stories, but I applaud the courage that it takes to share them publicly.

Ja. Ich denke, das ist eine der vielen Dinge, die viele Menschen über Cancel-Kultur interessieren. Es hat einen kühlen Effekt auf die Willen der Menschen, ihre Geschichten zu teilen und ihre Verletzungen da draußen zu stellen. Erzähl mir, warum du so einen Kritiker der Cancel-Kultur bist.

Sie ist die Autorin von »Calling In«, was sowohl ein mächtiges Memoir als auch ein Masterclass in konstruktiver Konfrontation ist. Loretta ist mein Lieblings-Krusader gegen die Kanzelkultur. Sie hat ein Geschenk, um Menschen bessere Wege zu finden, um Angst und Enttäuschung zu verhindern.

There's just a huge body of evidence in psychology showing that when you shame people, it tends to make them defensive. Und Defensivität ist das Gegenteil von dem, was man will, wenn man versucht, Leute zu verändern. Es öffnet ihre Gedanken nicht, es schließt sie ab.

I was hoping you would raise that distinction.

I've asked a lot of people over the last few years, why do you think it's effective to blame and shame people and to try to embarrass them publicly if you're hoping to try to facilitate their growth? I think in a lot of cases, it's ego.

They're too focused on, well, how do I feel powerful and how do I make sure that I get my point of view heard as opposed to how do I best communicate a perspective that's Das wird die andere Person erreichen.

I got so much out of your perspective on language policing in the book. I thought you had such an insightful and timely commentary on what's wrong with language policing. Talk to me about that a little bit.

Well, Loretta, I'm so happy to see you and could not be more thrilled to have you on Rethinking.

I love the way you refer to yourself as a reformed call-out queen. Tell me about that.

Can I ask you a few rapid-fire questions? Oh yeah, like I told you, I'm good at the dozens. What is the worst advice you've ever gotten?

What about best advice?

Na, das ist sehr nett von dir. Ich habe nicht gesagt, dass ich nett bin.

Ich denke, ich habe mich oft in Schwung gemacht, als ich jünger war. Ich habe immer versucht, zu argumentieren, dass ich richtig war und andere Menschen falsch waren.

Und ich fühlte, als ob ich einige Kämpfe gewonnen habe und viele Kriege verloren habe. And it wasn't fun to go around feeling like I was wielding whatever knowledge I had as a weapon. What I love about learning is sharing what I know, not using it to berate people or belittle people.

My greatest teachers were the ones who, they had a wealth of knowledge, but they were much more interested in what they didn't know. I wanted to be like that. I wanted to share what I knew in the spirit of trying to figure out what I didn't know and what we could all teach each other.

One of the things I realized as I was writing Think Again was that the true mark of a lifelong learner is knowing that you can learn something from every single person you meet. Yeah, that's true. And if you remember that, you can't be a know-it-all.

You've been meeting the wrong geniuses, clearly. We need to introduce you to the kinder ones.

Aber ich kann sie nicht meinen Freunden vorstellen. Gut für dich, dass du die Werte von Leuten siehst, die voll von Weisen sind.

Well, you are living proof that you don't have to be an extrovert to be charismatic and persuasive. And Loretta, this has just been a joy to soak up your wisdom. And I think we need more of it in the world.

I will look forward to that.

Guess what? Guess what? I'm not.

Well, thank you. I'm a huge fan of yours. Loretta reminds us that you can be forthcoming in what you say, while still being respectful and even kind in how you say it. Being direct with the content of your message doesn't prevent you from being thoughtful about the best way to deliver it. I think we need you to run for office, Loretta.

Es klingt so, als hättest du eine lange Geschichte davon, dass du nicht deine Zunge zerstört hast.

Also, geh schon. Wann hast du entschieden, dass das nicht der effektivste Weg ist, Leute zu erreichen?

Was there a particular moment when it blew up in your face that really led you to say, I've got to approach these situations differently?

Ich habe die Erfahrung gehabt, dass andere meine Worte mehr oft als ich sagen würde. Und meistens kommt es so, dass jemand mir einen Screenshot schickt und sagt, hey, diese Person postet deine Inhalte unter ihrem Namen, ohne richtigen Kredit. Und es wäre so einfach, zu loggen und Seite-zu-Seite-Screenshots mit Timestamps zu posten, die zeigen, dass sie meine Worte stehlen.

Ich will niemanden öffentlich schämen. Was ich in einigen Fällen getan habe, ist, dass ich einfach rausgekommen bin und gesagt habe, hey, jemand hat mir das vorgestellt und ich war wirklich überrascht, dass ich es gesehen habe. Und ich würde gerne verstehen, wie es passiert ist, dass du meine Worte als deine präsentiert hast.

Ich bin sicher, dass es nicht intentional war, aber ich würde es nicht mögen, wenn jemand dich von Plagiarismus beurteilen würde. Und jedes Mal haben sie geantwortet, wie ein bisschen schiebisch und verurteilt und dann sofort das Verhalten stoppt. So, is this an example of what you would call calling in instead of calling out? Or am I still a missing part of the process?

Oh, ich mag das.

Ich mag das. Es ist so lustig, du hast recht. Es ist ein bisschen eine Ecke, die herauskommt, wenn ich mich finde, dass ich möchte sagen, ja, ich liebte die Worte, die du geschrieben hast. Ich liebe sie so sehr, dass ich eine Zeitmaschine zurück in den Vergangenheit genommen habe und sie selbst geschrieben habe.

Which is not going to help anyone.

Ich kann damit arbeiten.

It struck me as I was reading your book that some of your formative experiences, trying to talk people out of hate and out of violence, really laid the groundwork for the way that you have challenged cancel culture. I think we live in a time when people are really quick to write others off. If you see someone hateful, the assumption is that the only way to deal with them is to cancel them.

weil es keine Möglichkeit gibt, sich zu verändern. Und trotzdem hast du in deiner Karriere und in deinem Leben demonstriert, dass sogar die Menschen, die etwas der schlechtesten Dinge über die Menschheit glauben, sogar die Menschen, die etwas der schlechtesten Dinge für die Menschheit getan haben, die Möglichkeit haben, die Seite zu verändern.

Und ich wüsste nicht, ob du ein bisschen über die Epiphany mit Floyd Cochran oder mit William Fuller sprichst.

What's so striking to me about those experiences, Loretta, is it would have been so easy for you to go to Floyd Cochran and to William Fuller and say you're disgusting, you're vile, and try to shame them into abandoning their worst beliefs and behaviors. And even then, you might have had some of those emotions, but you didn't express them.

Es sieht so aus, als wären das die frühen Versionen von dir, die sie einladen, anstatt sie auszuladen.