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

welcome to the huberman Lab podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday [Music] life I'm Andrew huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and Opthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine my guest today is Dr Adam Grant Adam Grant is a professor of organizational psychology at the Wharton School at University of Pennsylvania he has authored five bestselling books and most recently has authored a new book entitled hidden potential he received his bachelor's degree from Harvard University and his Doctorate from the University of Michigan today we discuss peer-reviewed studies and tools based on the data from those studies that can enable people to meet their goals and overcome significant challenges including how to overcome procrastination as well as how to see around or through blind spots as well as how to overcome sticking points in motivation and creativity we also discussed the research on and practical tools related to the underpinnings of performance in any endeavor including how to increase one's confidence and how to have a persistent growth mindset by the end of today's episode it will be clear to you that Dr Adam Grant has an absolutely spectacular depth and breadth of knowledge and that knowledge is both practical it is based on peer-reviewed research and he conveys those tools with the utmost Clarity and generosity indeed by the end of today's episode you will have more than a dozen new tools never discussed before on the hubman Lab podcast that you can apply in your academic Endeavors in athletic Endeavors in Creative Endeavors in fact in any area of life before we begin I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford it is however part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to Consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public in keeping with that theme I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast our first sponsor is eight sleep eight sleep makes Smart mattress covers with cooling Heating and sleep tracking capacity I've spoken many times before in this podcast about the fact that getting a great night's sleep really is the foundation of mental health physical health and performance one of the key things to getting a great night's sleep is to make sure that the temperature of your sleeping environment is correct and that's because in order to fall and stay deeply asleep your body temperature actually has to drop by about 1 to 3° and in order to wake up feeling refreshed and energized your body temperature actually has to increase by about 1 to 3 degrees with eight sleep you can program the temperature of your sleeping environment in the beginning middle and end of your night it has a number of other features like tracking the amount of rapid eye movement and slow wave sleep that you get things that are essential to really dialing in the perfect night sleep for you I've been sleeping on an eight Sleep mattress cover for well over 2 years now and it has greatly improved my sleep I fall asleep far more quickly I wake up far less often in the middle of the night and I wake up feeling far more refreshed than I ever did prior to using an eight Sleep mattress cover if you'd like to try eight sleep go to 8sleep.com huberman now through November 30th as a special holiday discount eight sleep is offering $500 off their bundles with a pod cover eight sleep currently ships in the USA Canada the UK select countries in the EU and Australia again that's 8sleep.com huberman today's episode is also brought To Us by levels levels is a program that lets you see how different foods affect your health by giving you real-time feedback on your diet using a continuous glucose monitor one of the most important factors in your immediate and long-term health is your blood sugar or blood glucose regulation with levels you can see how different foods and food combinations exercise and sleep patterns impact your blood glucose levels it's very easy to use you just put the monitor on the back of your arm and then you take your phone and you scan it over that monitor now and again and it downloads the data about your blood sugar levels in the preceding hours using levels has allowed me to learn a tremendous amount about what works best for me in terms of nutrition exercise work schedules and sleep so if you're interested in learning more about levels and trying a continuous glucose monitor you can go to levels. link huberman levels has launched a new CGM sensor that is smaller and has even better tracking than the previous version right now they're also offering an additional two- free months of membership again that's levels. link huberman to try the new sensor and two free months of membership today's episode is also brought To Us by waking up waking up is a meditation app that includes hundreds of meditation programs mindfulness trainings yoga NRA sessions and nsdr non-sleep deep breast protocols I started using the waking up app a few years ago because even though I've been doing regular meditation since my teens and I started doing Yoga Nidra about a decade ago my dad mentioned to me that he had found an app turned out to be the waking up app which could teach you meditations of different durations and that had a lot of different types of meditations to place the brain and body into different states and that he liked it very much so I gave the waking up app a try and I too found it to be extremely useful because sometimes I only have a few minutes to meditate other times I have longer to meditate and indeed I love the fact that I can explore different types of meditation to bring about different levels of understanding about Consciousness but also to place my brain and body into lots of different kinds of States depending on which meditation I do I also love that the waking up app has lots of different types of Yoga Nidra sessions for those of you who don't know Yoga Nidra is a process of lying very still but keeping an active mind it's very different than most meditations and there's excellent scientific data to show that yoganidra and something similar to it called non-sleep deep rest or nsdr can greatly restore levels of cognitive and physical energy even with just a short 10-minute session if you'd like to try the waking up app you can go to waking up.com huberman and access a free 30-day trial again that's waking up.com huberman to access a free 30-day trial and now for my discussion with Dr Adam Grant Adam welcome excited to be here very excited to have you here uh your career both public facing and academic career have covered an enormous range of topics so we have a lot to cover look who's talking um and anytime uh two professors sit down or even one Professor um says we have a lot to cover I think everyone listening braces themselves like oh no but these topics uh I assure everyone are of the utmost interest and you cover them in such both fabulous detail and you make it very clear so I'm really looking forward to this I'd like to start off by talking about something that I'm obsessed by and I know a lot of people are obsessed with and struggle with and I know you also have a recent publication on this topic which is procrastination I am a bit of a procrastinator but a different way of stating that is that I love deadlines I learned in college that I love love love deadlines because it seems to harm harness my focus and my attention I like just enough I guess you call it anxiety or autonomic arousal for the you know Neuroscience or physiology oriented folks for me just brings about a total elimination of all of the distractors and it seems to both slow and accelerate my perception of time and it seems to bring out my best to have deadlines but I would prefer to not have to procrastinate and in order to self-impose deadlines I prefer that other people impose those deadlines in fact so what do we know about procrastination why do some people complete things well in advance why do other people procrastinate is it that they're seeking deadlines as I believe I am and interestingly and sort of alluding to this recent paper viewers what is the relationship between procrastination and creativity I feel like we should just deal with all that later let's put it off no good one uh by the way there's extra credit for science funds on here so wa done one of the best articles on procrastination ever written was titled at last my article on procrastination fantastic I love it yeah it just made me smile um so I think the the the basic question I think to start with is why do we procrastinate and I I thought I was immune actually when I came into this topic uh I was the the person who annoyed my college roommates by finishing my thesis a couple months early uh I found out there was a term for me I'm a precrastinator uh so the you know the focus and the pressure that you get from a deadline I get that the moment the project starts um and sometimes months or years in advance and so I was really proud of finishing everything early and then I discovered there are things that I procrastinate on too uh which was a little bit disappointing are you willing to share what some of those I am uh so I um I procrastinate on any that's administrative uh so I'm right there with you you want to get time on my calendar it could take me weeks to respond you asked me a question about social science I will be back to you in a minute um I procrastinate on grading takes me forever uh I basically put off a whole bunch of tasks that I thought had nothing in common it turns out that I procrastinate when I'm bored like boredom is I guess it's probably my most hated emotion and so I will do anything to avoid a boring task and I think this goes to why people procrastinate which is a lot of people think it's laziness or you're not disciplined enough but actually the the research on this is really clear that you're not avoiding work when you procrastinate in fact a lot of our procrastination is is focused on doing things that involve a lot of energy you've seen people probably clean their entire houses when they're putting off a task um so it's it's not that you're being lazy it's that you're avoiding negative emotions that a task stirs up so for me it's boredom uh for a lot of people it's fear or anxiety uh I don't know if I can pull this off uh I have an extreme case of impostor syndrome in this role um the the challenge in front of me is too daunting um for some people it's confusion I haven't figured it out yet and so like I can't work on this because I I feel like I'm stuck um so what's I guess the big question for you then Andrew is what's what's the emotion that causes you to procrastinate you know it's hard for me to identify the stick here I think of it more as the carrot that comes with deadlines and again I I don't consider myself a procrastinator per se I just really love deadlines and procrastination is a terrific way to simulate the deadline uh so for me so you wait so you delay starting or finishing a task in order to have a a sense of time pressure that's right it builds a certain amount of internal arousal in me to know okay I've got 72 hours to complete something and it's now game time I like the game time before the game time before a podcast I'll put in anywhere from you know several days to weeks or even months in preparation so it's really elastic depending on the topic but when it came to exams in school or if it comes to writing deadlines um I consider the the shipping of the product or the presentation of the live event that I happened to be doing as the second game or event the first event is the pressure and the excitement of getting into the groove of doing focused work because for me that's such a drug I mean it feels like all having all the systems of my brain and body oriented towards one specific thing is just sheer Bliss for me so it sounds like then you're you're actually not a a chronic procrastinator thank you I've never that's never been uh the way I viewed myself but now I'll I'll I'll take that it's a strategy for you it is a strategy that's right and ient you know I was fairly Wayward youth barely finished high school Etc so by time I got serious about school which was my second year of University when deadlines were presented like there's an exam there's a midterm exam on a given date that was exciting to me that was exciting I was like okay that's the big thing that's my opportunity to to prove myself to myself because I was really coming from behind and then the opportunity to or I should say the the feeling of dropping into that Groove like this is the exciting part is the preparation you know likewise with podcasting for our solo podcast I love the research as much as I love presenting the material maybe more maybe more right likewise for University lectures or for traveling and giving seminars as a traditional academic I'm sure you're familiar with that right it's it's the preparation is where you realize it's almost like I I think of it as somebody like like a minor in a mine and just finding a gem and of course there then there are all the thoughts of what you can do with that later and you're going to show people it has a certain value to the world Etc but but it's the the searching and finding those gems that is like even as I talk about it I feel like my body's going to float out of the chair a little bit I I have the same experience it's the it's the the sort of the Unleashed curiosity and then the rush of Discovery and by the time you're teaching it or explaining it but I already know this like I'm not learning anything anymore and yes I'm excited to share it and I hope it's helpful to other people so you know I think as as you talk about what your process looks like I don't even think what you do qualifies as procrastination technically seem to getting better and better I me seriously if if you think about how procrastination is is defined it's it's delaying despite an expected cost and you don't think there's a cost you actually see a benefit that's right and I've tried starting that's not procrastination that's just delay yeah I've tried starting things earlier and um and I should say that my process often begins much earlier than the physical process like if I was being observed in an experiment be okay you know Andrew is finally sitting down to write this book chapter or you know finally sitting down to research some papers for an episode but I'm thinking about it all the time yeah I mean much to the dismay of people in my life you know I'm I'm I'm constantly thinking about these things I mean walking to take out the recycle I'll have ideas and then I'll write them down I constantly writing things down voice memos into my phone I have a method of capture where I basically try and just grab everything and then filter out what's useful do you have a process like that for for gleaning ideas a little bit I do now so um when when gin and I started this research on procrastination she had she had come to me she was a very creative doctoral student and she said I have my best ideas when I'm procrastinating and it was it was one of those moments where I didn't believe her but I thought it was an interesting enough idea that it was worth exploring and I said show me like get let's get some data let's see if we can we can test this and she ended up um Gathering data in a Korean company where she surveyed people on how often they procrastinate and then got their supervisors to rate their creativity and sure enough found that people who procrastinate sometimes were rated as more creative than people who rarely do like me the procrastinators and I remember asking her what about the chronic procrastinators and she's like I don't know they never filled out my survey yeah as I recall from that paper there's inverted u-shaped function with procrastination on the vertical axis and and um uh and creativity on the horizontal axis flipped sorry okay so um explain to me then the relationship between procrastination and creativity Yeah so basically the the peak of creativity is in the middle of procrastination ah okay got it and yeah there's a there's an upside down U curve there and so then I thought this was fascinating so then you know we go into the lab to say can we replicate this can we control it in an experiment and the hardest part of that was how do you randomly assign people to procrastinate like to my knowledge never been done before and we eventually figured out that we could give people a bunch of task to do and then temp them with highly entertaining YouTube videos uh that were sort placed on their screen and we put different numbers of YouTube videos there so that uh you know if there's only one you're not tempted to procrastinate much if there are four you're probably going to get sucked into a little bit of a YouTube spiral if there are eight uh you might be putting off the task that's much less exciting than than you know watching Jimmy Kimble's Mean Tweets for example and this was done in a fairly naturalistic environment for these folks people are people are on in a computer they're they're asked to you know to solve some creative problems that look pretty similar to what you might do in your job and then we're going to score your creativity later and um it turned out that the people who were attempted to procrastinate moderately um ended up generating the most creative ideas so why is that um there are a couple things that happen and you have to look at both sides of the curve so what's wrong with the procrastinators and also what happens to the the extreme procrastinators um and in both cases what happens is um you end up with a little bit of tunnel vision so um when I dive right into a task I'm stuck with my first ideas and I don't wait long enough to incubate and get my best ideas um I'm less likely to reframe the problem I'm less likely to access remote knowledge because I'm just I'm just diving right in and meanwhile The Chronic procrastinators um end up in the same boat because they don't get started until the last minute and so they have to rush ahead with the easiest idea to implement as opposed to really developing the most novel idea and meanwhile the the people in the middle who you know are starting to feel that pressure of like wow I you know I kind of Spun my wheels for 10 minutes watching a bunch of YouTube videos I'm running out of time for this task they still have enough time to work on the ideas that were active in the back of their minds and and that gives them a shot at more novel ideas so I've tried to adopt this to answer your question I've tried to adopt this as my process now to say I will still dive into a project ahead of schedule but I will not commit to an idea until I've let it incubate for a few weeks and I'm working on other things whereas an earlier version of me like when I'd sit down to write a book um soon as I had the book idea I would start writing on day one now I have the idea I file it away and I give myself at least a month before I begin drafting um and I think it feels less productive but it's far more creative what are your thoughts about some of what you described being an unconscious way of seeding the mind and the unconscious within idea so for instance uh let's take a a School academic scenario where um students get an assignment and the assignment is contain within a folder and it just says assignment okay and it's a doe on a particular date and it says do on that particular date and they're given the folder but they have no sense of what the assignment is you can imagine one category of procrastinator that will take that thing and put it down and avoid looking at it entirely versus another category of procrastinator that will Flip Flip it open and take a look at okay this is going to be an essay on you know um I don't know something about economic theory in the late 1700s close it and then procrastinate there is an idea which I frankly I subscribe to a little bit um because we recently did this series on Mental Health not Mental Illness but mental health with Dr Paul kti where he talked extensively about the unconscious and how the unconscious mind is always working with ideas things that we are concerned about performance these sorts of things even if we're not aware of them um what what are your thoughts about the creativity that seeded by slight procrastination being related to actually knowing what you're procrastinating on specifically I I think it turns out to be I don't want to say essential but critical so one of the things we found is in order for moderate procrastination to fuel creativity you have to be intrinsically motivated by the thing you're procrastinating on interesting and so what what happens is if if you if you're bored for example by the topic you're not going to open the folder you're not going to start thinking about it at all it's not going to begin you're not going to do any subconscious processing you're not going to have any unexpected connections um between this topic and something else you've learned uh learned about or been curious about if you're interested in the problem then when you put it off you're much more likely to still keep it active in the back of your mind and that's when when you begin to to see you know I I imagine you could explain the biology of this um I I imagine for example there's um there's probably um there are probably more neural networks um that are connecting um You probably get you get access to ideas that previously would have been um sort of separate nodes and so I think that you you want to know what the topic is right you don't want to just see the blank assignment but you also have to find a reason that this is exciting to you um otherwise you're going to avoid it as opposed to letting it percolate that brings us to the topic of intrinsic motivation um and I'd like to link that up with the topic of performance so when I was in university uh there were many topics that I was excited to learn about some more than others of course um but occasionally I'd be in a class or I'd get an assignment that frankly I had minimal interest in never zero but minimal interest and as a way of dealing with that I embarked on a process of literally lying to myself and just telling myself okay I'm super interested in reading this and I'm going to force myself to be interested in reading it and lo and behold I would start falling in love with certain things maybe he was was even the um you know the arrival of a word that I didn't recognize and then I would go look it up and I knew I was studying for the gr at that time so I file that away I still have my notebooks of all the vocabulary words that I learned in the course of my university courses that frankly made the verbal portion of the GRE pretty easy you know which if you ever try and study for that at the end it's pretty tough to commit all those new words to uh to memory and context so I could find little hooks and and through those hooks I could kind of Ratchet my way into a larger interest and then lo and behold I'm really interested in Greek mythology you know or that actually like that one at first but um I didn't have to trick myself but you know maybe we could spend a little bit of time talking about what is true intrinsic motivation is it always reflexive uh can we make ourselves intrinsically motivated about a given topic or scenario or group of people uh and then let's talk about how intrinsic motivation links to Performance because there's a rich literature on this as I recall and I remember you know the Stanford study of rewarding kids for things they were already in motivated to do maybe we could touch on that a little bit and remind people who haven't heard about it but I'm fascinated by this topic because I feel like so much of life is about doing things that initially we don't feel that excited to do yeah and yet succeeding in life you know until you can afford to offload your uh administrative work to somebody else which hopefully by by now you have find a way to get it done right uh this is fundamental to being a functional human being frankly not just successful in air quotes but functional we got to do stuff that we don't enjoy doing yeah so I think we we can talk about a couple different ways to nurture intrinsic motivation we could think about how the task itself is designed we can think about reward systems and then we can think about also the things we say to ourselves and others which I hope are not lies but rather U persuasive attempts uh let's let's start on that one actually I I don't know a lot of people who are that good at deliberate self-deception well well I like to think it was only around a particular set of uh goal motivated Pursuits um but at that time for me also was survival as I mentioned I didn't do well in high school I really wanted to perform well in University but I knew that working just for the grade wasn't going to carry me it was it it felt catabolic um and I don't know maybe I at that age I was still in the window of heightened neuroplasticity we know it never closes but um but I think I also fell in love with the process of learning how to do what I just described yeah so I think for most people the best method of self-persuasion is actually to convince somebody else uh so I'm thinking of Elliot Aronson's classic research on cognitive dissonance where he would he would ask you to go and tell somebody else a task you hated is really interesting and if he paid you a lot to do it you still hated the task because you had a justification like I got 20 to you know to kind of FIB a little bit about this task um you know the task is bad but I did it for the for the payment when he paid you $1 to go and tell somebody that you loved a task that you didn't you ended up liking it more wow and maybe I shouldn't be surprised but maybe you should tell me why I shouldn't be surprised because I hope people got what you just said very clearly and if they didn't if you don't like doing something going and reporting to somebody else how great that thing is so lying about it to somebody else um is one way to increase the degree to which you like or enjoy that behavior or topic and if you're paid $20 to go lie to somebody in the positive direction so against your true belief it's less effective in shifting your underlying AFF effect about that thing your emotions than if you're paid less correct yeah exactly now I think obviously in the experiment lying was an easy way to to show the effect but in real life I think that way that you want to apply this is to say all right I've got to find something about this task that's interesting to me and then in the process of explaining it to somebody else I'm going to convince myself because I'm hearing the argument from somebody I already like and trust and I've also chosen I've chosen the the reasons that I find compelling as opposed to hearing somebody else's reasons and so I think this this goes to the point that you were making which is if if you're trying to to find a hook to make a topic intriguing um you've got to figure out okay what is it that would make this fascinating to me and you in a lot of cases what you're looking for is a curiosity Gap um I think social scientists like to talk about curiosity as an itch that you have to scratch um so there's something you want to know and you don't know it yet so I would say I I tell my students often like take your least favorite class and find a mystery or a puzzle like something that you you just do not know the answer to um like I actually I've talked with our kids about this like what what really happened to King TD do you know can you get to the bottom of that and all of a sudden you're like I wonder I need to Google it and then I need to see if Wikipedia has credible information on this and the more you learn about that the more intriguing it becomes and I think that's that's the beginning of the process of of finding intrinsic motivation I see so inherent in your answer is the idea that there's something wired into our neural circuits and therefore psychology that Curiosity as a verb the act of being curious and seeking information where well and I should say I Define curiosity and I hopefully you'll disagree with me or agree either way it doesn't matter as long as we can get a bit deeper understanding I Define curiosity as a desire to find something out where you are not attached to a particular outcome yes is that right yeah I I in Psychology is typically defined as just wanting to know and that means you're driven by the question not a particular answer which is exactly what you're driving at okay great so and I think it Dorothy Parker that said um the cure for boredom is curiosity there's no cure for curiosity as there there shouldn't be a care for curiosity right so um and by the way folks we don't know what neural circuits subserve curiosity in the brain it's it's a got to be a distributed Network there's no brain area for curiosity but it's got to be linked up with the reward systems of dopamine Etc in some way because when one discovers something new that satisfies some curiosity it's clearly there's a there's a internal reward there okay let me back up so if your child or an adult is dreading working exploring a topic or going about an assignment of any kind um you will give them a question that they then need to resolve what if the the assignment is like rake the leaves off the front lawn do you uh do you say you know um count the leaves or I mean how does one get um past the sort of um procrastination and generate some intrinsic motivation for things that one dreads where it's unlikely that they're going to discover some knowledge that's exceedingly useful for the for future you always start with with okay what's what's the first experiment I can run find the most interesting looking leaf for your favorite leaf and then that that lasts for about two minutes and like okay now what we still have a lot of leaves there right I think not all tasks can be made intrinsically motivating to everyone and so when when intrinsic motivation is difficult to find what you want to substitute with is um is a sense of purpose um maybe a better way to say that is um when the process is not interesting to you um you need to find a meaningful outcome so there's uh there's some research on um on the boring but important effect where kids who have a purpose for learning um this goes through high school and think you know this is not just interesting to me but I'm going to be able to use this knowledge to um to help other people one day um they they're more persistent in their studying they end up getting better grades and so I think you know intrinsic motivation is often driven by curiosity about the how um a sense of purpose comes from really thinking hard about the why why does this matter and so I'd say with the you know the raking leaves let's try to connect that task to something else that you care about um are you going to um you know pleasantly surprise your parents when they get home um are you going to um you know have a place to play soccer that you didn't before um and I think then the you know the the process of of getting to that I guess what I'd say is if you're trying to motivate yourself um it's a little bit harder than if you're trying to motivate somebody else on this um if I was going to motivate somebody else I would take a a page out of the motivational interviewing Playbook where I would say Okay Andrew actually let's play this out for a second so you're going to rake a pile of leaves it's a two-hour task 0 to 10 how excited are you about that a three three really I'm surprised I I thought you were gonna say zero or one why is it not lower uh I like any sort of physical activity because it allows me to move and I just like moving my body there we go okay so you just identified a potential source of purpose for that activity um and I'm I don't have a I don't have a vested interest in convincing you to do this task I am genuinely curious about what would motivate you to want to do it and as you start to articulate it boom self- persuasion kicks in love it um I'm going to start using these uh these approaches um try at your own risk as we all know quality nutrition influences of course our physical health but also Al our mental health and our cognitive functioning our memory our ability to learn new things and to focus and we know that one of the most important features of high quality nutrition is making sure that we get enough vitamins and minerals from high quality unprocessed or minimally processed sources as well as enough probiotics and prebiotics and fiber to support basically all the cellular functions in our body including the gut microbiome now I like most everybody try to get optimal nutrition from Whole Foods ideally mostly from minimally processed or non-processed Foods however one of the challenges that I and so many other people face is getting enough servings of highquality fruits and vegetables per day as well as fiber and probiotics that often accompany those fruits and vegetables that's why way back in 2012 long before I ever had a podcast I started drinking ag1 and so I'm delighted that ag1 is sponsoring the huberman Lab podcast the reason I started taking ag1 and the reason I still drink ag1 once or twice a day is that it provides all of my foundational nutritional needs needs that is it provides insurance that I get the proper amounts of those vitamins minerals probiotics and fiber to ensure optimal mental health physical health and performance if you'd like to try ag1 you can go to drink a1.com huberman to claim a special offer they're giving away five free travel packs plus a year supply of vitamin D3 K2 again that's drink a1.com huberman to claim that special offer I have a question about externs motivation so if we grow up being incentivized by extrinsic things you know um you'll get your allowance if you blank um you can spend the money that you make and you know on your paper route doing the things you really want to do is there any value in those kinds of learning based incentives um for kids and for adults because I mean that's the real world as well I know I know plenty of people I family members that only work for a paycheck and they're pretty okay because they like spending their paycheck probably more than I you know I'm not intrinsically attached to money I mean I certainly have needs in in life but but I don't enjoy spending money for the sake of spending it or for gaining more possessions but I know people that do and I certainly don't judge um are they somehow existing in a um in a diminished landscape of happiness or or because they seem pretty happy to me uh but they seem to have also worked out this relationship they do certain things to get the extrinsic rewards and they really enjoy what they can do with those extrinsic rewards there's a so there's a huge body of evidence on what are the effects of extrinsic rewards on motivation and performance and I think the latest conclusions if you look at the the latest meta analyses so you know huge study of studies trying to accumulate like what's the average effect of adding a financial incentive to a task that wasn't incentivized before or to a job where you know you were paid salary and now we're going to give you incentive compensation um there is a boost so in general um people are are more productive when they're incentivized for their output but um these incentives are better for uh for motivating quantity than quality so you see people get more done but they're not necessarily more careful or more thorough are they less careful and less thorough no um actually they're there's still positive effects on average they're just weaker um and of course you could then start to say well how do I incentivize you know being fast and careful um but I think where where we do have to be really cautious is um there's an undermining effect of extrinsic rewards on intrinsic motivation and you were you were alluding to this earlier dating back to the early 70s where we know that if we take an interesting task and then we pay you for it you might conclude that you're only doing it for the outcome and you lose interest in the task so the the classic demonstration Mark leper and colleagues is kids playing video games and they're um they're playing them because they're fun and then you start to add in an incentive and then when the incentive is taken away they don't want to play anymore because the meaning of the task has changed and now I'm doing it because I want to get something out of it as opposed to I love the process I think that that um that phenomenon um does not have to exist so we know for example at work um if managers uh as long as they give people autonomy um they don't present the rewards in a controlling way um so instead of saying you know Andrew in order to earn this you need to do the following work uh if they say hey look you know I'd really love it if you you know if you would deliver the following um and in order to make that worth your while I'm offering this incentive people react very differently when they have a sense of choice and control um so I think that that's I guess the starting point in the presence of autonomy I don't I don't think there's a major downside of of extrinsic rewards I think you also have to be careful that um yeah I guess that you're not over justifying the task in other words you're not um you're not swamping people's intrinsic reason for doing it but you're adding a reason to try it so actually um if we if we go to a different domain for a second so um look at kids who don't want to eat their vegetables extrs and incentives are very effective to get kids to try vegetables for the first time but then the hope is that they discover a vegetable or two that they don't mind and then they find reasons to keep doing it um and I think that that's how I want a lot of rewards to work I don't think that rewards should be carrots that we dangle to try to control people's behavior I think they should be symbols of how much we appreciate and value a particular behavior and if you frame them that way it's a lot easier for people to say yeah you know what I'm that that reward is something that I really want but I'm I'm not only doing the task for that reward yeah that that you basically answered the question I was going to ask which is and you know at risk of sounding new Agy um but we are sitting in California um I could imagine that when one is focused on the extrinsic rewards so a physical task or a cognitive task for an exic reward if I'm focusing on the exic reward I'm also air quotes again not present right I'm I'm thinking about the outcome I'm not thinking about process and I think there's perhaps you can flesh out some of what this is exactly but I think there's a fairly extensive um data to support the idea that when we are physically and mentally present to the task that we're going to perform better and presumably our our um intrinsic liking of that task or performing that task increases as well is that true yeah I think so I think so if we want to break down the mechanisms for why intrinsic motivation is useful for for performance um one you touched on earlier it's focus of attention um you're it's much easier to find flow when you're intrinsically motivated you get into that state of deep absorption where uh time melts away so you mentioned you know sort of either speeding up or slowing down your your sense of time you forget where you are sometimes you even lose track of your identity and you're just you're just merged into the task uh and so that that that concentration is helpful there's also a greater persistence effect that when you enjoy what you're doing you're less likely to give up in the face of obstacles uh you're more likely to think about it when you're not doing the task and come up with great ideas and so um you know I think there's there's a working harder there's a working longer there's a working smarter and there's also a thinking more clearly effect this is a uh brief but related tangent one of the things that I've found incredibly difficult in recent years is that um you know most of my life really since I was a small kid I was forging for things and then you know I used to give lectures on Monday in class if they let me until they eventually stopped me about the stuff I was reading about all weekend so got an early start in the the professorial um front but now if I'm reading something and I discover a what I think is a really really valuable piece of information or a tool or a protocol I'm like wow this is really cool these findings are oh so cool there's a problem which is that now I have an opportunity to cast that out to the world through social media we all do this could be wait I'm sorry you're on social media um from time to time I you're all over my feet uh you and and I both do our own social media by the way which I really appreciate I think one can always detect if if someone else is handling someone's Social Media so yes I'm on social media and and I love that I have the opportunity to both um send out ideas and information and also receive feedback I really love the comment section um and always encourage comments I learn from it uh frankly love is a strong word I learn from it you know and and you and I were weaned in the academic culture where frankly the the kind of hazing that that one receives in academic culture is very different than the kind of hazing that one receives on social media but um let's just say that if you come up through Academia you develop a pretty thick skin um I agree I I do have to say though that there there was a part of me that was really surprised when I started posting on social that I love I love constructive criticism I was unprepared for the number of people who will knee-jerk criticize a study without even looking at whether the methods are rigorous right I'm like come on if I posted this surely it's at least worth considering the possibility that there's strong evidence behind it right well that's where a uh a um a brief uh I wanton to call it a rhetoric but a response of you know um you know clearly should read the study further because I think you'll be satisfied with the answer or something I don't know um but I agree it it can be a little bit harsh in there sometimes but you know the social media uh channels are I think have you know they have it's a double-edged blade um they obviously have their issues but um can be a wonderful opportunity to share information and share it quickly the problem is that it takes me out of what I was doing initially which was learning searching for those gems with with which to share later and I think there's a broader landscape to consider this where people for instance are uh I was at the beach yesterday it was just absolutely spectacular day at the beach uh especially for this time of year and everyone was taking pictures of that experience on their phone and probably sharing that experience either social media or with friends um this is very different than taking a photograph and not seeing that photograph until later or not sending it out and so there are now near infinite number of circumstances where we are taken out of the rewarding experience I should rephrase that we are taking ourselves out of the rewarding experience and focusing on a different rewarding experience that I think by definition is an extrinsic reward so we are taking ourselves out of our intrinsically rewarding experiences and activating these extrinsic rewards and do you think in any way that's undermining our experience of things that we really enjoy um again not to demonize social media or these channels but um I've personally found it difficult to refrain from sharing this knowledge I'm so excited to share but I deliberately delay and there's a lot I have a deep list of folders full of things that I want to post but I'm just doing it you know systematically over time because I really fight the temptation to to do this mostly because I want to continue to enjoy this learning process and this seeking process so much yeah I I feel the same the same um I feel torn I think I think it was eie white who said uh I I rise in the morning Torn Between the desire to enjoy the world and the desire to improve the world and this makes it difficult to plan the day and I I I feel that every day I think I mean I I even I felt it this morning I was like okay it's time to it's time to leave to to come to the the hman podcast I'm like wait but I I I didn't hit my minimum sunlight viewing so what what do I do do I show up on time for you or do I meet your criteria the the um the explanation I wasting getting my morning sunlight and therefore I'm X number of minutes or even hours late would have been completely fine I figured as much that's that's a built-in acceptable excuse with you I think I mean I think everybody experiences a version of this and um it's definitely gotten worse with uh with social media and with smartphones um I think so one of the the most startling data points for me was um Gloria Mark first put this on my radar uh before covid the average person was checking email 72 times a day how do you ever concentrate for more than a couple minutes if you're self- interrupting that often you can't um briged Shelty has a great term for this she she calls it time confetti and she says we're taking these meaningful blocks of time and we're slicing them up into these like tiny little dots of confetti and uh not only can we not accomplish anything uh we're also eroding our own sense of Joy um because it's really hard to enjoy the you know the 30- second blip of time that you get on a test um and I think we know a lot more about the existence of these problems than than how to solve them but one thing we do know is blocking out un interrupted time is Meaningful uh there's a great Leslie Perlo experiment where she takes engineers and she has them uh she sets a quiet time policy no interruptions Tuesday Thursday Friday before noon 65% above average productivity could you repeat the um the protocol again yeah so quiet time there are a couple iterations of it but I think the most effective one was Tuesday Thursday Friday no meetings no interruptions no slack no emails before noon and during those periods of no interruptions one could tend to whatever their primary purpose is at work yeah so for me it might be podcasting obviously I don't have my phone in here and never do um but it doesn't mean no interaction with anyone else it just means focusing on the major task the task exactly and you come in with a clear sense of priority and purpose and I don't think there's anything magical about 2 Thursday Friday before noon uh it's just the idea of setting a boundary and collectively committing to it that that seems to be important and I think you know I when I think about this uh I'd be I'd be really curious about your take on um on chronotypes here because I think one thing I've learned in the last couple years is that if you're a if you're a morning person um you do your best analytical and creative thinking in the morning and so the quiet time block would work very well for for me as a morning person if you're a night owl you probably want that block in the late afternoon and I was encouraged there there was some evidence during Co that uh people have their best meetings right after lunch uh that there something like 30% less likely to multitask in an after lunch meeting uh and I guess you know you could probably unpack the like the food coma uh you know getting re-energized by other people but it's led me to wonder if we should all be protecting the first few hours in the last few hours of the day for deep work and then doing our core meetings and interactions and kind of off task activities in the middle what do you think about that as a sequence yeah well I have a lot of questions about this for you but um I love that sequence it certainly fits with my natural rhythms I I think there's ample evidence to support the fact that provided one is sleeping well at night and is on a more or less a standard schedule when I say standard I mean going to bed somewhere between let's say 9:30 and 11:30 p.m. waking up sometime between let's say um 6:00 a.m. and 8:00 a.m. maybe 5:30 or 7:30 um some something like that so not highly unusual Night Owl or super early bird um for people that are following that sort of schedule the first let's just say from zero to eight hours after waking there tends to be a a fairly robust increase in all the catamin so dopamine norepinephrine epinephrine which generally okay generally speaking uh lead to increases alertness attention and focus that are great for analytic work uh great for implementation of strategies that you already understand and you need to churn through a lot of stuff um and of course there's a big increase in the morning especially if you view morning sunlight a healthy increase I should say in cortisol cortisol is not bad folks you you want cortisol but you want that Peak early in the day we know that okay so um for most people it seems at least my understanding is that um that period of time 0 to eight or uh eight hours after waking or so um is best devoted to the quote unquote most critical tasks but one of the common problems is that people take that um ability to implement a known strategy and they start battering back all the emails or talking to all by the way talking to co-workers is great and it's often required but it's what the question is whether or not it's productive conversation or whether or not it's just conversation and we tend to have a lot of energy early in the day and I'm I'm obsessed with the idea of neural energy as opposed to just caloric energy um so there we're talking about neural energy and then post post lunch so really as we get to sort of you know 9 to 17 hours after waking there is a dip in autonomic arousal that during the middle of the day the postp perial dip there a post lunch sleepiness um that can be partially offset by delaying your morning caffeine a bit if you have the afternoon crash but it's interesting that you know that more productive meetings and less um task switching and distraction occurred um in meeting set after lunch because that makes me think that perhaps being a little bit less alert is going to lend itself to more focus and indeed that's the the sort of optimal State relaxed but focused you know you're not sleepy um but you also don't have so much intrinsic energy that you're you know tending to a bunch of things because I think a lot of people do feel that way you know and I'm drinking you know Double Espresso right now um late midm morning um late morning uh and you know I can sit still but I think certain Zoom meetings how do I say this I don't want to offend any of my colleagues I mean they are boring enough they are not content Rich enough to to grab all my attention and nowadays of course there are multiple screens typically I've got two phones in a computer and you have to really spend some work to flip over those phones while I'm on a zoom and things like that um so what were you saying so it's maybe the reduction in autonomic arousal that that supports what you just described but I don't know um my my thinking uh or my understanding rather was that creative work and kind of um brainstorming was best accomplished in the late afternoon um I've noticed when lecturing I'd be curious what your experience is with um in University lectures when I held courses in the evening I used to like to hold my courses 5: to 7:00 p.m. or even 7 to 9:30 p.m. when I was teaching undergraduates that people were much looser and more relaxed and I always um uh thought that that might have something to do with an increase in Gaba transmission that's known to happen late in the late evening that people are just kind of more relaxed more and less social anxiety they've been around people for much of the day any I I I send back more Reflections than answers I don't have any firm Neuroscience explanations for what you described but but there are some emerging theories about how it might work and it has this 0o to 9 hours Phase One 9 to 17 hours phase two and then of course from 17 to 24 hours I'll call it phase three you should be asleep yeah ideally well that I I think there's there's a there's a confound in your your teaching experience which is undergrads often sleep in until what noon or they might be up until 4 a.m. or at least 10: a.m. seems to be a typical rise time for the undergrad so a morning class might be too early for them to be fully awake but there is um there's some brand new evidence that at least on creativity at work um I read a series of I think it was three studies recently showing that early birds actually did do more creative work in the morning um and in part uh I think again the I don't I don't think any neuroscientist has has touched the mechanisms on this yet but in terms of the psych ological processes um early on there's just there seems to be a benefit of um of the energy level um and some of that energy leads to more Divergent thinking uh and later if you're a morning person you might lose the ability to to diverge quite as much and so you end up in a more conventional space of thought does that does that track it all with your understanding of how it might play out in the brain my understanding is it would be a little bit in it would be individual but you know there is something to these Lial States between sleep and waking so maybe we can um r convenient bow around what I said and what you what you just said which is um that we know that in the transition States into an out of sleep and it doesn't necessarily have to be within the first half hour in and out of sleep that um there seems to be more Divergent think you or at least activation of neural networks that um are not as constrained as one observes when they're in a in a sheer task and strategy implementation mode right I mean I think is that similar to the shower effect the shower effect so people have ideas in the shower or while running or um while falling asleep or my best ideas always come within the first hour after waking that's why I carry a notebook around and much to the dismay of people in my life oftentimes I I don't want to hear or from or talk to anyone first thing in the morning uh this is problematic and I had to make adjustments we'll talk about adjustments between um uh productivity and uh uh control and and um Family interactions this is something I know you you've worked on and and written about um but those Lial states are are interesting and and I'd love your thoughts on this um I've had several guests on this podcast talk about their creative process um namely Rick Rubin um he's famous for his work in music producing also has a great podcast tetri grammaton um as well as Carl dice Roth a colleague of mine who's really in the 0.00001% of um super talented bioengineers neuroscientists who also happens to be a full-time um clinical psychiatrist and has five children okay um and I asked them about their creative process because both of them are very creative um Carl's process involves the following late at night for him but it could really be any time of day deliberately making his body as still as possible and forcing himself to think in complete sentences Rick's creative process although it includes a lot of different things has a lot to do with also getting very still lying down okay other folks that I've spoken to academics and and artists have referred to getting their body into motion but quieting their mind so these are two opposite processes in one case the body is still but the mind is deliberately very active in the other scenario the body is very active but they're making their mind sort of in free association not still but they're not deliberately thinking about any one thing fascinating and I'm obsessed with this maybe you and I could work on this you know I'm due for a sabatical maybe we could figure this out because I think I've never seen anyone study this before right because the the the nervous system no the nervous system I'm not aware of anyone has done it formally either the nervous system of course is a is a brain body phenomenon and so what happens when we sort of cut off the deliberate operations of brain or body and it it doesn't seem to matter whether or not it's brain or body as long as one is deliberately shut off and so anyway I love your thoughts on this um I don't consider myself like a Ultra creative or creative type um to any great degree but me neither that's why but I'm fascinated right but right but that's but I'm fascinated by these deliberate tactics that highly creative people have have uh undertaken um in order to bring about ideas I certainly have some of my best ideas when I'm running and I'll just be running along like my goodness I wasn't even thinking now I need to write this down okay and then continue uh I tried the diero approach and the the Ruben approach actually just spent a week with Rick um overseas and indeed he spends a lot of time just still thinking and it's a very hard practice to to get um to get consistent with I wonder I wonder if there are individual differences here on on which needs to be stable or steady um I'm think you know I'm thinking about a huge part of creativity is um is overriding your default instincts and if you're somebody whose default is to have your mind constantly going then quieting would probably shift your your train of thought to something more original or unconventional um the opposite might be true if you have a naturally quiet mine I would imagine you need to you need to sort of jolt yourself out of that with lots of access to you know to Freer ranging thoughts and so um it'd be interesting actually to study whether we can predict what you should steal based on your personality yeah I want and maybe what we could do in that study I think we have a collaboration Brewing you know there's a joke you know two two scientists walk into a room and what comes out is a collaboration so um I'd want to put people in a scanner it's hard to get people treadmilling in a scanner because the movement artifact but and just look at net uh resting Network activation and compare that to resting Network activation when people are completely still and forcing themselves to think in deliberate deliberate sentences and then look at the overlap in that vend diagram that's what's of interest to me they may be completely different brain States they might actually have more similarity than differences I wonder then if you can tie that to differences in the quality and quantity of output so I would imagine that one of the benefits of either kind of movement is that you um you end up increasing the volume of ideas which we know is good for variety and ultimately increases the probability that you stumble onto something new but then I think this the being still part is probably better for the filtering process of I think one of the hardest parts of creativity is actually judging your own ideas um most most creative people have many terrible ideas in fact the most creative people have the most horrible ideas U because they just have a lot of ideas and um I think that maybe there's a there's a way in which quieting either your body or your mind allows you to gain some distance from the idea and see whether it's boneheaded or promising I'd like to take a quick break and thank our sponsor insid tracker insid tracker is a personalized nutrition platform that analyzes data from your blood and DNA to help you better understand your body and help you reach your health goals now I've long been a believer in getting regular blood work done for the simple reason that many of the factors that impact your immediate and long-term health can only be analyzed from a quality blood test a major problem with a lot of blood tests out there however is that you get information back about metabolic factors lipids and hormones and so forth but you don't know what to do with that information with inside tracker they make it very easy because they have a personalized platform that allows you to see the levels of all those things metabolic factors lipids hormones Etc but it gives you specific directives that you can follow that relate to nutrition behavioral modifications supplements Etc that can help you bring those numbers into the range ranges that are optimal for you if you'd like to try insid tracker go to insid tracker.com huberman as a cyber monday sale which will include Monday November 27th and Tuesday November 28th insid tracker is offering 50% off their full website again that's insider.com huberman along those lines when one is trying to gauge the quality of their ideas um how do you cope with uh how does one cope with not placing a judge on that that um causes some you know false negatives where you're where you're wiping out great ideas because um you know Rick ruin talks a lot about you know don't give the audience what they want they don't know what they want they haven't seen it yet if it's a truly creative idea they haven't seen it and um but of course we all have to develop our own sense of taste so well how does this process work for you I mean you've written about and worked on a tremendous range of topics um and always you know I must say say with with such rigor and such Clarity of communication about those topics yeah it's absolutely true I mean like 100% so we say around here no weak sauce you know and a great phrase there's no weak sauce in your game it's incredible so um when do you get your ideas and how do you filter those ideas I feel like the when could be anytime uh I think the I mean you've you've clearly experienced this too for me the best thing about hosting a podcast is I have an excuse to learn about anything I want from almost anyone I want and I get to call that part of my job and so I feel like you know that having that built-in mechanism for learning means ideas could could come at any moment uh the the filtering process for me is um it's evolved over the last few years what I what I do now is if I'm let's say I'm I'm starting a new book I'll write a draft of the first chapter and I send it to five to eight people whose judgment I trust and by Design some of those people are in my field they're you know deep-seated in organizational psychology others are you know very far outside but curious about the topics I'm interested in and I asked them for a zero to 10 score uh this is something I learned to do as a as a springboard diver uh where you I would I would take off um and you know I'm doing a few flips or twists and I think my dive is good but I can't see it because I'm hurling in midair and it's a everything's a blur and so I have to rely on my coach to tell me if it was any good I feel like creative work is the same way you're too close to it to know how the audience is going to react to it and yes you don't want to create it just for the audience but at the end of the day you want it to be you know interesting or useful to them so I asked for the zero to 10 and no one ever says 10 and then I use that as a calibration mechanism so if everybody's in the seven or eight range I know that I'm on to something promising and now I need to refine it if I get a bunch of twos threes three and a halfs I either need to rethink the idea or dramatically rewrite how I'm positioning it and I think one of the mistakes a lot of people make is they know they need feedback on their ideas they go to one or two people and they start to feel a little bit defensive or threatened and their ego gets involved and then they don't ask for any more what they don't realize is it's actually less painful if you get more feedback because when eight different people critique your work you start to realize that a few of the comments that sort of bruise you a little bit were just IDI syncratic and no one else cared about those issues but then five people had the same problem like that is not taste that is a quality issue and I've got to focus on that and so it really helps to filter what are the what are the revisions I need to make what are the problems and complaints I need to pay attention to versus what can I ignore because maybe this product was not for that person I'm recalling when I was a postto I had a manuscript fully prepared and I worked in a laboratory where I didn't work on the same thing as my postto advisor he was very gracious and letting me be the outlier um and he said well I don't know anything about this topic so before you submit it to this fairly prestigious very frankly very prestigious Journal I'll be honest um you should probably go down the hall and hand it to so and so I don't want to mention who it was because I'm still in the same Department um and I gave it to him this individual and he looked at and he said yeah you know it looks interesting but I don't think there's going to be a whole lot of interest in this it's just like not I was like no way like this I think this is really cool but I was pretty dismayed so I was like oh go so what do I do so I went back to my adviser and thankfully he's a bit of an iconic CL and he said that's the best feedback you could have gotten definitely submit it to that particular journal and I must say that paper got accepted faster than any other paper I've never had an experience like that I mean it required some revisions I remember thinking like wow what an unusual response to after having instructed me to go ask a a a more senior colleague right he was a at that time assistant professor and then to get the ne essentially negative response and then to take that as like you should definitely send it out really taught me a lesson that sometimes one needs to invert their um their action according uh to the negative feedback they get not always but um that was an N of one okay so it's not uh shouldn't be extrapolated to too many circumstances but um basically led me to um not seek out uh feedback prior to submission of things terribly often I mean uh I check information obviously prior to podcast I check the validity of the information in podcasts and papers but um it made me realize that people's opinions can be like highly idiosyncratic and and in some cases outright wrong and really the the opinion of the journal is what What mattered most in in terms of getting it accepted or not so um how do you you said give it to the greatest number of people but if it's anything like comments on social media there's a salience to negative comments ments so how should we filter positive versus negative feedback well there's a there's a met analysis here this is kuger and Denise um looking at 100 Years of feedback research and they found that what drives the utility of feedback is not whether it's positive or negative it's whether it focuses on the task or on the self so if I tell you that your work is terrible you're going to get defensive if I tell you that your work is great you're going to get complacent if I tell you here's the specific thing that I liked about your work you're going to try to learn to repeat that and if I tell you here's the thing I didn't like you're going to try to see if you can fix it so I actually think we should worry less about whether the feedback is encouraging or discouraging and more about how do I make sure that I get input that's going to allow me to learn from my strengths and also overcome my weaknesses um and actually I uh one of the things I've I've learned recently is there's some I would say a growing body of evidence at this point that asking for feedback is not the best way to get people to help you um because when you ask for feedback you end up getting two groups of people you get cheerleaders and you get critics and cheerleaders are basically applauding your best self critics are attacking your worst self what you want is a coach which is somebody who helps you become a better version of yourself and the way you get people to coach you is not to say give me feedback because they will then look at the past and tell you what you screwed up or what you did right what you want is to say can you give me advice for next time and then they look at the future and they'll give you either a note on something to repeat or something to correct and this is such a subtle shift that it can make a big difference um Andrew one of the things I've I guess I found myself applying this to a lot is um uh after giving speeches I used to get off stage and say i' would love some feedback and you get back a bunch of oh you know I really enjoyed that thanks what do I do with that information I'm trying to learn how to get better and when I shift the question to say what's the one thing I could do better next time it's like oh don't open with a joke the audience couldn't tell you were joking um uh frequently it's give me a little bit more of a through line uh you focused a lot on you know a bunch of interesting points but I lost the connective tissue and you know those those actionable suggestions are much more likely to come when you just ask for a tip as opposed to an evaluation oh that's so good I'm G to just pause for a second I I've never taken a pause I've taken occasional pause to be honest but they're very rare um as the audience knows oh that that's just gazillion dollar advice because I think that um everyone has an ego we all want to perform Well we'd like to perform better over time and negative feedback hurts and it can hurt a little or a lot depending on how defensive we are but a tool like you just described to uh remove some of that defensive armor that we all have and and actually let the information in in a way that's constructive uh is really great what you described I think is a way to create constructive criticism but the constructive part is really coming from within yeah as opposed to saying I'd like some constructive criticism and then hoping that the criticism is actually constructive so you're taking control over the process in a healthy way in a benevolent way that that's the goal and I think the the big question that comes up for a lot of people at this point is okay so I get somebody to give me advice but it might still sting how do I get better at taking it constructively and I think probably my favorite technique on this I learned from Sheila Keen she calls it the the second score and the idea is that when somebody gives you a piece of criticism uh that's your first score so let's say you know they like I in my in my world they gave me a three and a half and I want to know how I can do better next time how do I get myself to focus on that what I do is say I want to get a 10 for how well I took the three and a half and that's the second score I want to evaluate myself on how well I took the first score I I think about this almost every day there was um actually can I tell you a quick story so when I was uh right out of my doctorate I got asked to teach a a motivation class for Air Force generals and Colonels I was 25 I think 25 26 um you know they're they're all twice my age uh they've got thousands of flying hours they've got billion dollar budgets uh they've got well you know this community well their nicknames Striker and sandun and I was extremely intimidated so I I walked in there and I I thought I had to impress them and I started talking about my credentials and you know all my research experience and the feedback at the end of the 4our session was brutal I remember uh reading the feedback forums and one person had written more knowledge in the audience than on the podium I was like true I can't argue with that and then another wrote I gained nothing from this session but I trust the instructor gain useful insight and that that was devastating I was like can I like I would really like to transform into an actual bear and hibernate for the next four months and then maybe I'll come out of a hole ready to hear this I didn't have that option I had committed to teach a second session a week later so all I could do was figure out how am I going to hear this feedback and really take it seriously and I guess I applied a version of the second score and I said all right there you know there's some general that are going to come back and see me again and I've got to prove to them that I was open to feedback and one of the things I heard loud and clear was that uh they valued humility and I had led with too much confidence which was just insecurity masted and so I thought okay how do I how do I change the equation and walked in looked at the room and I said I know what you're all thinking right now what could I possibly learn from a professor who's 12 years old dead silence like oh no this is this is going to go horribly wrong and then uh one of the guys in the audience jumps in he's like oh that's ridiculous you got to be at least 13 everybody started laughing it broke the ice and I think what what I was trying to do was to take myself off the pedestal and say look I heard your feedback uh you told me that you didn't think I had anything to teach you and I've got to acknowledge that right up front and be open to the fact that that's true and so I want to come in here and learn from you and I want to see if I can Curry to conversation where we all end up learning and the feedback was night and day different afterward I I one one person wrote although Junior inexperience the professor dealt with the evidence in an interesting way I like all right I'll take it and um there's something really powerful about about saying look you know I I can't change the fact that they hated my session what I can do is convince them that I was motivated to learn from their criticism I love this concept of the second score and thank you for sharing that story I think um you know very very often um we hear about people like you who if people didn't catch the math in there uh you were a PhD by age 25 um and as far as I know the the youngest tener professor at pen at 28 so these are outrageous uh outrageously impressive um metrics of accomplishment but for you to share a um a story about uh you know um less than Optimal Performance and how you adjusted to it and and and the incorporation of the the second score um that you're referring to I think is uh is really appreciated because I think that um as much as we hear you know oh you know Jordan you know took many more you know free throws and everyone just thinks about all the ones he made you know people think about all the ones he made that's the way the game works that's the way the mind works I should say so it's um I appreciate that you flesh it out with a with a personal example I too would want to turn into a barar and disappear but I would but I think that um it's really impressive what you did and and I and it makes me think that the second score of getting a 10 at at bringing the three and a half up right uh as it were um is really about turning a score into a verb process you know over and over again as I've do this podcast and as I've taught in the classroom what I keep coming back to is this idea that we should be focusing more on verbs and less on nouns we love to name things and categorize them but but when we start living life through a lot of verb processes so instead of getting Being Fit uh we think about that you know or running as a thing we really think about like just running right it becomes less daunting and and we accomplish far more but the idea that um you know and this has this there mathematical models of this I'm sure but where you're basically talking about you know like an integral right as opposed to just some value right you're talking about the slope of the line yeah right so you're a three and a half how are you going to get to a 10 gosh that's a huge gap and you're dealing with being back on your heels psychologically from getting all this you know battering feedback from these uh you know these uh highly accomplished individuals all these inment and you know literally wearing them presumably on their body body uh so for you to see and and it's really about creating it's about taking control of the slope of that line from the three onward and it's really a forward-looking perspective so I don't think we're being unduly uh psychological here or analytic I mean I think it's really about taking a a moment State and a noun and turning it into a verb yeah I think that's right I I'm reminded of the great philosopher Homer Simpson who said that verbing weirds language uh so it's harder to talk about this stuff in verbs I swear I didn't steal it from The Simpsons but if it came from Homer Simpson like I'm all for it you have to I mean that's small brain small brain but you know given the size of his brain and people have seen the image uh uh you know fairly fairly robust knowledge no I I I think you're on to something I think um verbs are active and we're we're drawn to them um I think yeah a lot of times people review their past to work and they just like they end up shaming an earlier version of themselves and they they wallow in rumination and what what we want to try to do in that situation which is e easier said than done is is to say all right like the purpose of you know of of getting feedback or advice is not to shame my past self it's to educate My Future Self um which I think is very connected to a lot of the work on growth mindset that that you've been talking about and uh there's been a firestorm of controversy around uh can we teach growth mindset in schools lately and uh I think what what that is underscored for me is look you can't you can't expect someone to listen to One podcast episode or go through one workshop and magically believe that they're capable of learning anything at any moment um this is something we have to actively work on on a daily basis and part of doing that exactly as you said is thinking about the slope and saying all right um the person that I'm you know I'm competing with is my past self and I want to get a little bit better today than I was yesterday yeah I think um along the lines of growth mindset obviously we both know Carol DW and uh respect her tremendously and I um and I realized there is some controversy now around how you know readily one can teach growth mindset or incorporate growth mindset my understanding and um I'd love to know your thoughts on this is that when the D work is combined with some of the Ali Crum work that is growth mindset is combined with a knowledge just a basic and true understanding that stress and the feelings of anxiety and tension that um can actually be performance-enhancing when those two things are combined I think this is the work of David joerger and colleagues at UT Austin that uh indeed growth mind becomes um more visible in our in our uh mindsets and performance um and are there other aspects to growth mindset and and other um other mindsets that are now being woven into that framework that that can be helpful because I know um gosh if ever there was a great name for a aop psychology growth mindset it tells you everything you want everything you need and everything you sort of need to know and just the name um but uh we all find it difficult to implement um just just telling myself I'm not as good as something as I could be yet it sounds great but in moments of you know receiving feedback uh that's harsh um sometimes it's hard to access yeah it is I think so the the latest there's a mamera um at all met analysis and then you know I think sort of that camp versus the the Carol and David Camp um you know have very different views on how big the effects are but I think one thing they they seem to agree on is growth mindset is more important in circum ances uh where people are more likely to need it um so if you think about for example um kids who are impoverished um or marginalized communities um you know the message that you actually you know that you you are capable of um you know of evolving your skills to the point that something you're bad at today you could be good at next year um is really important when you've never heard that before um and when you don't have a single person believing in you I think where um where we're often missing the boat is we think all right I'm just going to I'm going to instill this idea in a person's head and my work is done um and we know that the context around you really matters so um actually Carol's done some research showing that uh growth mindset is more likely to have an impact uh when your classroom culture um also and your teacher right has the belief that kids are capable of learning and growing um that your you know your starting ability is not fixed in any subject and I think we probably for all of us as individuals what that means is we need to think about the the micro environment that we put ourselves in um I think you know the GU one one of the things I've thinking a lot about lately is scaffolding and the idea that you know when you're when you're trying to improve at something you don't need a a permanent teacher necessarily you don't need one Mentor you know guiding you for nine years what you need is is somebody who can give you the temporary support that allows you to to scale to a New Height just like a scaffold wood on a building um and in learning theory basically the idea behind scaffolding is we're we're going to initially give you the support you need to solve a problem and then we're going to slowly remove the support so that you learn to to do it on your own and I think that those those kinds of scaffolds are often missing so we instill the growth mindset like I've got this belief in my head but I don't know what I need to do um to you know to put that belief into action and that's where um that I guess that that to me is we have to go beyond mindset we have to think about how do we put people in a context that allows them to to put their beliefs into practice you are asking me what else do we need like to support growth mindset and make it effective right yeah I mean we know people learn what growth mindset is it's the idea that you're not as good at something yet okay terrific but it's very hard to implement in real time there are I have to presume additional tools that one can uh bolster the growth mindset with make it make it more accessible um and benefit from it yes so um Justin Berg and Amy res nesin I uh studied this actually uh we did um we were looking at growth mindset at work and uh Justin's uh well he's at Stanford I don't know if you met him yet I have not but big place um he'll be on the list soon if a brilliant creativity researcher and Amy just joined us at at Wharton and uh has fundamentally changed the way that I think about um ideas um in the way that she studied how we can shape our context and just done pathbreaking work there and we we were interested in growth mindset and we we designed an intervention where people could learn growth mindset at work um so we taught them to think about how their skills were malleable how they could stretch their knowledge into new areas and we found that teaching them that was not enough to boost their happiness or their performance what we needed to also do was um give them a growth mindset not just about themselves but also about their jobs uh in other words to teach them that your job is a set of flexible building blocks that you've got a whole bunch of tasks that make up your job some of those are you know are things to do others are might be interactions that you need to have and if you break down your your job into all these tests you might have some tests that you want to accentuate and make a bigger part of your job others that you want to try to subtract um others that you might swap with a colleague and a lot of people it turns out think their jobs are are fixed by their job descriptions but in fact you have a ton of opportunity to say wait a minute you know there's something there's a strength I have but I'm not using it right now is there a way we can bring that into my work and so um in these couple experiments we did when we randomly assigned people to learn both that their jobs were malleable and that their skills were malleable um they got a sustainable boost to their happiness that lasted at least 6 months there was no cost to their performance u meaning you could to redesign your own job to be more enjoyable without uh without a drop in the effectiveness of your contributions uh to your workplace and I think what I I came away from that research realizing is like it's not enough to just say well well I can get better I can improve because very often you feel like your your environment is limited I'm like great like yeah I can grow but I'm stuck in a deadend job and so what we need to do there is um is open up the opportunity for people to um to to innovate on their own job description and then growth mindset can begin to to have an impact I love it it sounds a bit like adding a s to growth growth mindset so it's not growth mindset it's growth mindsets uh because earlier you mentioned that in the classroom environment if the teacher adopts a growth mindset yes as well as the students well then you have a culture of growth mindset so it's the um interconnectedness of of this and the and the context in which the individual's growth mindset exists do I have that right well put yeah we we ended up calling it dual mindset um but I think making it a plural is good because um you know it's it's not I I have this image of um you know you you put a person in a in a cage and then tell them they're capable of growing they're still stuck in a cage and so we need to we need to give them a chance to to bust through those walls super important I hate to take us back to an earlier topic U but there's something that I meant to ask you that I didn't and I'm absolutely needing to ask you which is your recent work or recentish work it was a few years back now and you're so prolific that I have to call it a few years back um the relationship between intrinsic motivation and performance on other tasks um yeah and the reason I asked this is severalfold um I did two episodes of the podcast on ADHD and one of the things that I learned in talking to experts on ADHD people with ADHD as well as looking at some of the novel treatments everything from behavioral to prescription drug to even nutrition-based was that kids and adults with clinically diagnosed ADHD are actually terrific at paying attention to things that they really enjoy or that they're super interested in so clearly they have the capacity it's just that they have um deficits if you will in attending to things that are less exciting to them less intriguing to them so if I recall correctly uh you have a publication that explored the relationship between intrinsic motivation and performance in other stuff yeah and one of the major conclusions was that having a deep deep interest in one thing might not be the best uh condition for performing well at other less interesting tasks Could you um could you tell us about that study what what motivated you to carry out that study and what some of the major takeaways were yeah definitely um you you summarize it really well I think um the the original impetus so this was another project with G shin and uh G came to me want wanting to study intrinsic motivation and we were talking about what do we know about intrinsic motivation and what are the gaps in our knowledge and one thing that has always bothered me is when psychologists study something that sounds positive and they only study the benefits of it like there's no no such thing as an unmitigated good right all all all sort of enjoyable experiences have costs all unpleasant experiences can have benefits we need to we need to fill out this two by two of good thing bad thing um good outcome bad outcome um and so my challenge to her was can you show me the Dark Side of intrinsic motivation and she came back and she said what if there's a cost of loving a task leading you to hate a task that you don't like even more than you did before I like oh that's an interesting idea it tracks with the basic psychology of contrast effects uh where um you know if you eat something delicious then your least favorite food tastes a little bit worse afterward and so I said let's let's study this so um she ended up getting data from um from people at work and then we also designed an experiment and sure enough uh the the more passionate you are on task one the more your performance suffers if task two is really boring and I guess what what this did for me is it made me think differently about task sequencing I used to wake up in the morning and do my most interesting task first and then the grading was hell and what I do now is I start with a moderately interesting task it's a little bit of a warm-up for me and then I have an exciting one to look forward to and if I do have a task that's boring but important I think the performance is going to suffer less interesting um I normally don't ask about morning routines and how one structures a day because it's highly individual completely agree yeah and and it depends on whether or not people have kids and they're pets and you know other uh but I'll just share with you a brief anecdote I have a friend who's a very accomplished musician and has been for for several decades now and he told me that he has a practice of after he gets off stage and he's like Stadium Stadium sellout level um musician um has been for a long time and shows no signs of stopping just incredible but a very down toe person um and he said one of the first things does when he gets off stage is to go do some menial task I thought there's no way that's true but I've known his wife since college and she she verified that statement I was like what what sorts of medial task you talking about he's like oh like cleaning up some of the cans and things that are there maybe even cleaning a toilet at a venue and I thought no chance but it turns out to be true and I said what what's this about is this about humility he said well maybe a little bit but he said it actually makes it a lot easier for him to return home and deal with the kind of little things that just are out of scale with the experiences that he just had he's tapering way okay I think yeah yeah I I first of all I was so struck by the fact that he had um created this process for himself so long ago and he's also somebody who's you know he's maintained he's like been the same marriage for an extremely long time he's he's extremely happy in that and his family I mean see one of these people that seems to thrive in all domains of life and I'm certain that he struggles in some domain of life because everybody does but um it sound to me like a very unusual practice but it seems to kind of relate to this that you know he has this thing that he loves doing playing music and performing in particular and he's just you know you know .01% at doing that um then just like bring himself back down to Earth because so much of life and especially family life is like dealing with the the Schmutz and the inconvenience of everyday life yeah he's it's it actually sounds like what he's doing is he's resetting his frame of reference to say if you know if I go right home then the contrast between you this high octane experience I'm having um and sort of muddling through everyday life um is going to be extreme if I do something really small then um family time is going to seem a lot bigger yeah so I realize I'm I'm taking a bit of a leap from your study on intrinsic motivation and and low performance in in other domains but you know to me cleaning up cleaning a toilet is you know I it's it's uh it's boring for all the wrong reasons right um as you said you do not want that to be an exciting no and and listen I mean if I had to do it for a living I would you right and I would try and do as well as possible and uh uh but um right so well I found that study to be particularly interesting because I think that these days we um we glorify high performance even quotquot Peak Performance um something we can talk about and we forget that um yes often times people who are ultra high performers can afford to pay other people to do all the other stuff but I have to say in knowing some ultra high performers and in knowing some people in the um billionaire bracket you know there's a high incidence of of mental health issues frankly and um lack of satisfaction with life that maybe even comes from not um having to do anything besides the things that you find most intrinsically rewarding um we all think that oh I if I could I spend all day doing the things that I find most intrinsically rewarding but maybe there's something about this Push Pull we know the brain works in push pull with almost everything that having some experiences each day that are kind of like H this a thing again do you think that heightens our level of satisfaction for the things we really enjoy I would be surprised if it didn't uh I think I think contrast effects are very powerful and we know I mean the there's half a century of research on happiness suggesting that the comparisons we make are what matter um you know I think I think Tim Urban probably put it best when he said happiness is reality minus expectations and if you only have enjoyable experiences your expectations are rising into perpetuity uh so it doesn't matter how good your reality is you wanted it to be better and better um I think one of the things that mundane experiences um managed to do for us uh or maybe a better way to say it is I think one of the benefit fit of mhen experiences is they keep our expectations on the ground uh and allow us to be pleasantly surprised by you know a task that was more interesting than we expected even though we didn't love it what are your thoughts on um what I call Momentum which is when I have um an experience that I particularly like like if we record a podcast and I'm really excited to get it out into the world or if I have some experience that I'm left you know very excited by at the end that often times the energy again I'm obsessed with this concept of neural energy the the energy that I gan from that experience seems to have carryover into other things like you know I'm going to be much more excited to just go across the street and get a cup of coffee feels like a bigger thing than it normally would um and I would think that one could kind of ride the wake of a of a prior accomplishment even a small accomplishment each day and make the you know tidying up of or doing things that one would normally find more boring less boring is that true the way you're describing contrast effects makes it seem like it's more of a cliff like that thing was great and now this thing but I also can kind of ride high on um something that happened 2 3 days ago maybe even two three months ago if so feeling good equates to feeling good or feeling good uh accentuates the the bad stuff this is the tension between contrast and spillover and you can see both under different conditions I think where this is I this is a brand new sort of I don't think anybody's reconciled those two two perspectives yet but my hunch from having work on the contrast part of it is we found that it was only extreme intrinsic motivation that had the performance cost on other tasks so if you're if you're enjoying something um if you like it uh that will give you a lift for other tests um it's it's where this is the best thing you've ever done and now other things suck by comparison um that's where we start to see run into a problem I also wonder um if there's a domain switching effect here um I think you're you're alluding to this um I I read some research that just came out this year showing that um one of the benefits one of the surprising benefits of morning workouts is you actually have more confidence in your job uh because you get that small win like I accomplished something this morning and that gives you a sense of efficacy that you can carry over into your you know the start of your work day uh not to suggest that everyone should work out in the morning because I'm I'm with you I think everybody should you know both work and work out at a time that works for them but I think um I think there's something to be said for uh something went really well in one realm of my life and that boosts my belief in my capability to tackle challenges in a different realm what about in the opposite direction uh you were a competitive diver um I have to presume that there were days when you had lousy Dives it must have been that that one day Adam felt like every day and then you you leave you know you you you shower up dry off head head into the rest of your day and you know how do we segment away from the you know negative thought spirals of like something went really poorly and now you're off into the domain of life where you can do you know how to do the things that you're required to do but maybe there's some Challenge and some learning involved how do we cut Moes between negative experiences I think uh I mean the Ted lasso strategy is ideal become a goldfish 10-second memory and then you don't even you don't even recall the practice you had earlier today I think that I don't know anybody who can do that consistently um and I think the more disappointing the experience is the more you tend to to dwell on it I think uh when when you talk about segmenting negative experiences I think the probably the research that I've liked best on this and I just want to I want to make sure I capture this clearly um I basically so research on emotion regulation says there there are two strategies that tend to be effective one is distraction the other is reframing uh so distraction is you know find something else that will consume your attention um that's unrelated to the thing that you just bombed at uh and the hope is that you know that that Fades into the background reframing is a lot of what you were talking about a few minutes ago which is okay let me Focus you know not on the level of my performance but the slope um my diving coach Eric best uh has a really great set of questions that he he asks and you know I I I remember I would i' finish practice like this is a terrible day I just feel like I'm worthless as a diver and now diving was a big part of my identity I'm going to let my team down now I'm a bad teammate too my coach is wasting his time and like now you know he could have been you know training somebody much better like why am I doing this and Eric would ask uh did you make yourself better today and even if it was a bad practice there is something that improved yes okay and sometimes the answer feels like no and then he would ask did you make someone else better today like yeah I gave a little tip to a teammate um you know I I made a joke that you know that made everybody laugh and he was like great then it wasn't a bad day and I I think this is this is an example of what good reframing looks like um to say okay the goal wasn't to be great it was to be better the goal wasn't necessarily just to make myself better it was also to make other people better um and I think those are the kinds of questions that seem to segment pretty well I love that feedback because I think we all get stuck in those thought Spirals and um again not to demonize smartphones because they are wonderful tools but I have to remember the time I'm 48 years old uh as of tomorrow and I have to remember a time in which um negative stuff was probably happening in the background but I didn't hear about it because no one was texting it to me so I'd find out at the end of the day when I still had time to do other things in the meantime right um that said I would also get Negative experiences early in the day and then carry them throughout the entire day when nowadays you can get a positive text message that says okay it wasn't so bad um or something like that but um I do think as is probably becoming apparent about um these channels of communication are are either bounds or disruptions to our our positive psychology it's clear that we're just like being bombarded all the time so um just as a as a practical question uh what is your relationship to your phone um do you set boundaries around your phone use or the types of communications and activities that you engage with on your phone I do so everyone I think everyone I know has a to-do list I also have a to don't list and on my to don't list includes I don't scroll on social media and I don't pick up my phone uh past 900m and those those two habits are enormously helpful particularly in the not scrolling um I pick up my phone when I have something to post or when I want to see what the comments are and then see if there's something interesting to learn or or somebody that I want to respond to um and that that that becomes a really healthy boundary because I don't get stuck in one of these rabbit holes where all of a sudden two hours have gone by and I feel like uh I feel like I wasted my time uh where do you post or keep your to-do and your to don't list do you keep them on your phone no it's a Word document on of my computer okay so you're still at the computer screen quite a bit each day yeah okay I I feel like that's where most of my good thinking and writing happens MH yeah I carry a small notebook around with me now and write things down I was just curious one of these yeah well like one of those yeah yeah I try not to take notes on my phone ever right yeah it's it can be problematic for me uh especially with with voice recognition now because you just it's hard to go back to that in a systematic way for me but I'm a big believer in these these things that but for those listening and not watching I'm holding up a pen so like pencils work too you you've probably read some of the research also showing that you have a better memory for information when you take notes by hand than by keyboard uh I didn't know that but I'm very very gratified to hear that so the and I suppose if you don't have a pen and you don't have uh a pencil handy then you know blood always works just kidding I'm just kidding don't don't don't uh don't make yourself or anyone else bleed just to get an idea down but it is amazing how sometimes we will have ideas while running walking showering out and about and then later trying to recall those ideas and if we don't write them down they're gone the great Joe Strummer from The Clash talked about the critical importance of carrying around a small notebook such as you did because he said that the ideas Fall Down Like Rain and if you catch them they're there but if you miss them they truly won't be there later and that's there's something kind of eerie about that like why wouldn't we be able to remember these potential gems of ideas all right the the the geysering up of the mind we had a guest on this podcast for a series Dr Paul KY um psychiatrist um and he talked extensively about the unconscious ious mind I mentioned this a little earlier but uh one of the things that really stuck with me is he said you know everyone thinks that the prefrontal cortex and the frontal cortex is the supercomputer of the human brain sets context planning strategy switching etc etc certainly it's valuable real estate to our intellect and all our abilities but he said you know the the real supercomputer is the unconscious mind however that unconscious mind that lives below the surface of our awareness is also what drives a lot of our unconscious defenses so our so-called blind spots so projection projective identification you know I mean these have these can be both good or bad they can serve us well or or poorly uh and so on and so forth but implied in this notion of the unconscious in blind spots is that we can't become aware of things unless we either do dedicated work to become aware of them or even better would be dedicated work where we are asking other people to say Hey listen you have a blind spot and it is blank blank and blank so tell us um about the role of blind spots maybe even some positive aspects of having blind spots but more importantly what we can do to fill in those blind spots and and uh perhaps also explain how how they can limit us and if you have any examples that um from the research where um people overcoming their blind spots has benefited them that would be amazing yeah wow there's a lot there let me well let me start by saying I think a lot of people think about blind spots in terms of heris sixs and biases so you think about confirmation bias you think about the the classic Conan tersi work uh that ended up winning Dan a Nobel Prize on um you know the the way in which um you know our intuitive judgments um often get anchored in the way we've done things before um or you know we focus on the information that's San and available to us and Overlook you know less obvious information I've come to think that the the mother of all biases is uh what I what I think of as that I'm not biased bias um it's it's technically called the bias blind spot in Emily pron and and colleagues research but the idea is that I think I'm more objective than other people and you may have your you may have flaws in your thinking Andrew but me like I I see things clearly and rationally and I think that this is a it's a really dangerous metabias because the moment you believe you're not biased you are incapable of seeing any of your biases um so in some of the research on the bias blind spot you see that um that people who have um who score high in cognitive ability tests so you know high IQ are actually more likely to fall victim to the I'm not biased bias because they've been reinforced for a lifetime uh that they're really smart and they're good at thinking oh goodness this explains some uh we don't talk about current events on this podcast much but this explains some current events uh people that were told their entire careers that they are perfect or near perfect and um uh yeah circumstances eventually came to you know slam them hard into the concrete on that one or or in some cases it hasn't happened yet but we we watch them hurdling toward Earth um so I I worry a lot about that so I think the beginning of you know of seeing any blind spot is recognizing that we all have blind spots it's part of Being Human um I think that the brighter side of that is that we're not just blind to weaknesses we're also blind to our strengths um so Jane Dutton and Laura Morgan Roberts and colleagues uh did some research on the reflected best self-portrait this is one of my favorite exercises to do in the classroom but also to do in workplaces sometimes even people end up doing it with their kids at home the idea is that you know you do have strengths that you're not that aware of uh they may be things that come naturally to you that you don't even realize are hard for other people they may be things that are struggles for you um and so you you think it's hard to do and therefore I'm bad at it but other people watch you do it and realize you're actually quite good at it so the you need other people to hold up a mirror to see what these invisible strengths are so the way the reflective best self Exercise Works is you're asked to contact 10 to 20 people who know you well in different walks of life might be a family member a couple friends some colleagues and then you ask them to tell a story about a time when you were at your best and you collect these stories it's it's the most exciting week of email you will ever get 20 notes let me tell you how great you are but what's key this goes back to our discussion of feedback earlier is they're really specific about a moment when you are at your best and then your job is to collect all the stories and do the pattern recognition exercise and ask what are the common themes that I've seen through these stories and it's a it's a really powerful and Vivid way of of getting a sense of what are those strengths and um you know it's not surprising that in some of the research when people go through this process um they end up with much more clarity not only about what they're what they're good at and where their potential lies but also how do I like what do those situations have in common where I was able to use my strengths and how do I get myself in those situations more often how do I create those situations more often um I I'll give you a personal example on this so I I got a bunch of feedback that uh I was good at helping other people see their strengths and I thought okay I don't feel like I have enough opportunities to use that strength in my daily life so what am I going to do about this and I ended up flipping the exercise upside down and I picked a 100 people who um really mattered to me and I wrote a story to each of them about a time when they were at their best and I'm like there's there's no reason I can't I can't make this part of my day um it's probably it was it was probably one of the best weeks of My Life um it was better than getting the stories was was giving them uh and I got these notes back from people saying you know I I didn't realize I don't even remember that thing that happened um but I think for me it was an example of saying okay um you know I've I've always enjoyed um trying to bring out the best in others uh I don't feel feel like at the time I was a I was a first year doctoral student I didn't feel like I had anything to contribute to others I'm try I'm trying to learn how to you know understand this field and you know do a worthwhile study and write a paper I'm not teaching yet I have no value to add and getting this feedback like oh you're somebody who helps other people see their potential I'm like all right let me let me take some people that I you know I already recognize um really amazing things in and let me just tell them that uh and it took me about a week to write the the 100 emails and um I can't think of a a week I've spent better wow it's so interesting that you flipped the process on its head a bit um or a lot and that ended up being the reward do you think you learned anything about given that it was early in your academic career do you think you um learned anything about your uh particular Talent OR desire to to do what you do now I mean so much of what you described it seems to map well to what you do now I mean you could be uh if you were to choose or have chosen uh just not just but a laboratory scientist doing experiments um you're clearly still doing that at a with a tremendous productivity but you've also decided to tell the world about the information that you're Gathering and the work of a lot of other people as well I guess I feel a kinship here because we both do this um much much more interesting toite other people's work than talk about what you already know it is indeed um and it's fun to be able to to weave one's understanding of the process into you know like what are other people doing and know how hard it is to do really good experiments and um be able to spot really good experiments but you did you learn in that early um stage of your career that like I think I want to do this later because what you do now is it Maps pretty well onto what you just described I I don't think it was it wasn't crystallized at the time but it was definitely one of those seeds that was planted that that must have grown because I I remember right after I got tenure uh a wonderful colleague of mine asked if I would write a book with him and I was so flattered and I went into to talk to my undergrad research lab later that day and I you know I mentioned off hand I like hey and you I got this invite I'm going to write this book and they freaked out like no you cannot write somebody else's book you have to write about your ideas first like if you're G to write a book write your own book and I I I was very resistant because I love other people's ideas no I what I I feel like what I do best um I think it was um boy who wrote about the scholarship of Discovery versus the scholarship of integration and I never felt like I was a Eureka you know blindingly you know original Insight person I felt like what I was good at was synthesizing ideas um and you know kind of taking a bunch of um you know pieces of cloth and and sewing them into a quilt and allowing people to see the big picture in a way they hadn't before and I felt like I could do that with a colleague who was already a successful author and my students basically held me hostage and they said you've been doing this research for you know for over a decade now and you have a responsibility to share that outside your classroom and it reminded me of of that experience of saying okay there's something I see in other people I want to share it with them um and maybe I could do that on a broader scale so yeah I think there was there were definitely dots that connected there when I was uh a master student at Berkeley there was a guy who's now moved to Michigan State Mark Breedlove who I hope to host on the podcast actually is this really interest does really interesting work on the biology of sexual differentiation and um Mark I think that's an invite if you're listening yeah right uh and he um it is indeed and he said to me he said you know review articles provided they are written by people who um are credentialed in a given field are cited at you know 100x anyone particular paper now at the time I wasn't interested in um uh impact factors in fact I've never paid any attention to impact factors they their importance varies in in different countries and um in the US they they play some role um more so in Europe but I I could care less about impact factor frankly um because those those metrics aren't what it's going to carry you through the difficulty of Designing and carrying out a hard experiment you have to be intrinsically curious about the answer right you know this and I know this but um but he basically said uh What uh something that's really supports your point um which is that ultimately the ability to synthesize information is can feel um really good and he started talking about the the the feeling that he got from doing that he's also a tremendous bench scientist as well in any event um I'm so glad that you flipped that exercise on its head because now the world gets to benefit from you doing that for us all the time because I I realize now that much of what you do is to help um people identify and erase their blind spots by um and I love your social media channels um and I noted uh on Instagram and I do scroll but but I scroll through into your your channel too um you know you'll put up in short form content that that really highlights the key importance of people embarking on strategies that they wouldn't reflexively take that that I see that over and over again it's like we think that the best leaders do blank but actually the research says they do exactly the opposite and and you have a a vast um kit of those so along those lines you know what are some of the most common blind spots that um You observe uh and that people could benefit from understanding and and um doing contrary action uh around as it relates to uh let's say interpersonal relations in the workplace or at home and and and maybe we could um seed this with uh a finding that you've also written about which is that you know people who have and exert a lot of proficiency and even control in their profession life will sometimes bring that to their relationship life and that doesn't work right the idea that like being in charge and being confident is a great is a great set of attributes um but it can really fail us in other domains uh can we weave that in with blind spots yeah we can so I think that so one of the things I I found over the past few years is that and this was inspired by a a Phil tetlock framework um a lot of us spend a lot of our time thinking like preachers prosecutors or politicians preachers prosecutors politicians yeah so you can think about these as as three mental modes that even if you've never worked in any of these careers you you will watch your thinking colored by at least one of them more often than you would like so in preacher mode you're basically proz your own views uh and you I mean Andrew you're a in some in some situations I think of you as a highly effective professional debunker of preachers of you know certain kinds of snake oil when it comes to health um and you know and biology um sometimes you take that too far and people might accuse you of being a prosecutor uh where you're attacking other people's views um and then um the third mode politician mode is is basically you don't even bother to listen to people unless they already agree with your views what I what I think is is interesting is these these modes of thinking are adaptive for in in certain roles um so preachers make great sales people they're often Visionary leaders uh prosecutors are often highly effective scientists right we Excel criticizing other people's work and finding what's wrong with it um politicians are great at currying favor um they do a lot of lobbying they win approval the problem is that all of these modes stop you from questioning your own assumptions and beliefs um so my I I'll tell you my biggest device is prosecutor mode uh I've been called a logic bully my wife had to explain to me that was not a compliment oh my goodness if I I mean I know I know you've experienced this too if I if I if I feel confident that there's strong evidence that somebody is wrong I believe it's my moral responsibility to correct them and that never goes well amazing um I won't reflect on my own experience I'll just say yes and yes uh right right the the um logic word ninja mode um is one that I think we're trained in as academics we are and that and you know if you're a lawyer or you know or uh many other professions as well um and I think it holds value and it can be very effective in certain domains but um less effective in other domains yes and I think part of the problem is you know when I actually whether you're preaching Prosecuting or politicking excuse me or politicking you look like you're not open uh because you've already in all cases you think you're right and other people are wrong and so that makes it really hard for other people to to reason with you to disagree thoughtfully with you so my favorite alternative and and this is at the heart of what you do for a living um and for fun is thinking like a scientist and when I say thinking like a scientist I do not mean that you need to buy a microscope or invest in a telescope what I mean is as as you model so effectively a good scientist has the humility to know what they don't know and the Curiosity to constantly seek out new knowledge there have been multiple experiments showing that when people are taught to think like scientists uh their judgment improves and so did their decisions and I think a lot of that stems from um when when you go into scientist mode you realize that all of your opinions are just hypotheses waiting to be tested all of your decisions are experiments and so you're like well I you know I'm not trying to prove that I'm right I'm trying to find out if I might be wrong and then if I find out I am wrong it's easier to Pivot and instead of being really invested in being right I can try to get it right um and I think in some ways that's the that's the meta message that I'm trying to communicate to people with my work is um assumptions are meant to be pressure tested they're meant to be questioned and challenged and if you're not open into rethinking your views um then you basically turn thinking into a religion uh and I don't know about you but I prefer to base my views on on good data um as opposed to Blind Faith um and I think that's been a huge part of your contribution in the last three or so years to public discourse is um you've you've helped people think more scientifically and talk more scientifically about their daily habits and behaviors and um I guess my my big question is how do we help people do that more often even in domains where they don't access to scientific knowledge and they don't read journals first of all thanks for the kind words of feedback I think you know my my goal is always to you know identify who's coming to the podcast for health tools and protocols and hopefully teach them some science and scientific thinking and for those that are coming to the podcast for Science and scientific thinking hopefully they get some health tools and protocols also but um because I fell in love with science for the exact reason that you're describing which is that I uh I lived I grew up in a family that was very divided politically along religious lines along essentially every line of like what foods to eat what was healthy what wasn't and the only way I could reconcile um these very frankly polarized views was to you know embark on the scientific method pose a hypothesis and then try and disprove one's hypothesis and some things get through the filter and it's a constant learning so um I should just ask when you teach people how to be a scientist in order to uh try and overcome some of their blind spots and be better thinkers better meaning it serves themselves and people around them better uh is that teaching them what a hypothesis is that a a hypothesis is not a question it's it's sort of a um you're you wager on an idea with the understanding that you very well could be wrong and then you try and disprove that idea is that is that sort of the Crux of of what uh in these experiments is um you're describing as teaching people how to be scientists like if they just do that then they'll they're going to benefit I think that's that's at the very heart of the lens is I want to just double click on the idea of disproving your hypothesis right most people live in a Land of confirmation bias where they're they're basically just looking for support for their pre-existing beliefs that's right they're click foraging we all do this by the way I'm not criticizing here we all will have an idea and then we will click forage online to support the idea that we disagree with them they disagree with us ah here's somebody I agree with and that agrees with me I think and do you think this has roots in our um you know in the neural Circuit underpinnings of of um just wanting to have affiliation that affiliation feels good yeah having people that are like us knowing that we're kind of protected in that yeah I think that's a big part of it I think one of the reasons that we we encase ourselves in Echo Chambers and um hide in filter bubbles is uh there's there's a strong evolutionary pressure to avoid social exclusion and so you know it's not it's not just the you know being drawn to affiliation it's also um I I really want I'm afraid of being excommunicated from my group and if I challenge the Orthodoxy of the community that I belong to I might be an outcast um and I don't think I don't think every day people think through that logic but I think there's a there's a deep-seated um visceral tendency to avoid that and you know I think the when we think about teaching people to see their blind spots more clearly um a lot of that is is recognizing it's hard to do that on your own um because by definition you're blind spots are invisible to you and so this is why other people's input is so important and I think you know I'm I know this makes a lot of people uncomfortable but I think everybody on social media should follow people that they disagree with but not just for the sake of it you want people who reach different conclusions from you but where you respect the Integrity of their thought process those are the people who really stretch your thinking and I think that's what we were train to do um it's what I was trained to do as a social science a social scientist is to listen to the ideas that made me think hard not just the ones that made me feel good and to surround myself with people who challenged my thought process not just the ones who validated my conclusions and I think you know a lot of people hear that message and they're like no but I don't want to let that like that awful perspective into my world I'm like no you want to be more nuanced in saying who are the people where before I knew what their answer was I would be impressed with the depth and the thoroughness of their reflection and their analysis I should be following those people and learning from them regardless of the the hypotheses that they generate and the results that they share I'm so glad that you mentioned the um importance of following people that you disagree with I think one thing that we have to highlight and I'm hoping will maybe even emerge from this conversation is that follows are not endorsements and and this is actually a real problem I mean there are academics who have lost their jobs not necessarily for following certain accounts but for um commenting on certain common threads maybe even a like is a is a slightly different category because it's as the name suggests it's a like it's a it sounds like and it's thought of as a vote of approval of what's there yeah but when one's options are just um you know a heart uh a follow or no heart no follow um you know I was a big fan of the thumbs up thumbs down I kind of like the thumbs up thumbs down because at least you have that you have an option to to um to descent um without getting into online uh comment battles and things of that sort but um listen i' I've had um uh people ask me why do you follow so and so because follows are also seen as a sign of support because you're adding adding followers and presumably uh in the algorithm raising prominence to a channel but I'm right there with you I follow lots of accounts um of people who I fundamentally disagree with but I'm trying to learn and I'm also trying to understand what what their capture points are like like why people find them so intriguing yes um anyway I'm I'm a learner I'm a forager like you so I I'm in the same boat and every once in a while I think like it it's stunning to me I don't know if you've ever looked at your like your Instagram statistics um but some somebody um a colleague of mine actually showed me I was like I didn't I didn't realize you could look at the effect of each post on follows and unfollows oh I didn't realize that and you know the I think my typical ratio might be two or three to one for a post so you know I'm gaining two or three to two or three followers to every one that I lose the idea that I could post anything that would cause someone to unfollow me like if I said something interesting enough that you thought I was worth following how could how could one post change your mind about that I think you're too focused on what I think and maybe not paying attention to how I think um was my my first reaction to that and then my second my second thought was well maybe maybe What's Happening Here is like people show up and they don't realize the foundation of evidence behind the total body of work and so one post you know strikes them wrong and they think this person is not credible or they think that this person has um you know lost sight of you know of what rigorous science is I wonder if you you've had that experience too of like I I think I I make the mistake of taking for granted that anybody who followed me knows that if I post something I think it's worth thinking about and um you know it's it's been carefully studied and I didn't have a you know I didn't have a dog in the fight I read this research and said this cleared the bar not only of an academic Journal um but I read the methods and I found them sound enough that we ought to be discussing this idea um have you had that experience too um I certainly have and I should say that you know I was weaned in an academic culture three separate mentors very different styles all of whom um were excellent mentors but all of whom taught me that you know there are phenomenal papers where the every bit of information in the paper and indeed how it's written from start to finish is just watertight and incredible and there are other papers that are less watertight but occasionally there will be papers where one data point in a figure is intriguing enough to consider following that scent Trail in your own work even if the rest of the paper is kind of eh I mean one data point now that doesn't mean taking one data point and casting it out to millions of people on social media as an actionable item is is is valid that's certainly not what I'm saying but what I do realize and and I'm realizing again now what you just said is that indeed people don't know the context under which like what like what filters are we working with before we bring things forward and I think that um you know my belief is that if it's grounded firmly in the scientific method that um that's the best starting place we were talking about that earlier and I also understand that scientists differ tremendously in how they look at even the same data in the same paper so there is no governing body that says okay this paper means blank the authors have their interpretation the students have their interpretation in fact the course I used to teach um to undergraduates which grew into a very large course we would learn to ask four questions what's the question that the authors were asking sometimes a sub question what methods did they use what did they find and then what did they conclude and does it relate back to the original question and that simple um breaking out of four questions of study is essentially what I do for all studies um but I have my way of doing it and it's going to differ from the way that other people do it um social media uh I think what's interesting is that I think there's always going to be a core following of a of a given person like your your followers that they're going to trust you know not necessarily across the board but there there's a general acceptance of ideas coming through I think that on social media it's hard to strike a balance between setting the whole context and the action will takeways I get criticized a lot for not being concise enough and I agree but I but also get criticized for putting things taking things out of context so uh such a tight rope walk it's a tight RPP walk and it's always going to be a tight RPP walk and so I'm going to just you know keep going and I know you will too um and and listen I I'm there's there's some kids out there it's surely not going to be that are going to take our jobs eventually and um and we'll find a way to do it much better who knows through AI or something might be robots um I feel like this is an appropriate place to ask about something else since we're talking about sort of percept of of of others and and gleaning information overcoming blind spots it's something that you've written about some years ago now I guess it would be almost 8 years ago now um about authenticity um you know the word authenticity is is such a mindfield such a mindfield I was going to say such has such a gravit positive gravitational pull like oh they're really authentic as opposed to what's the opposite of authentic fake right but um I think we could all learn to draw some lines between authenticity and oversharing right how do we gauge authenticity and we can refer people to that article you wrote some years ago I think um you may have written it differently where to be written today but you talked in that article about somebody who essentially decided to tell everyone that he worked with all the things that he was interested in um uh doing with them relating to them and it did not serve him well okay so that's authen right and so then there's this um this notion of benevolent deception in order to preserve relationship and in importantly um it brought about a word that we don't hear about very often but that I I rather like which is edicate like there's so for social media by the way I apply classroom rules I'll tolerate any comment in the comment section but not the sort of comment that I wouldn't tolerate in a classroom if you start insulting other you can insult me but if you want to insult other people I'm not going to tolerate that so um that's where I draw the line classroom rules there's an etiquette and I think that um etiquette is important so how do we balance authenticity with etiquette and also with preserving one's uh uh one's public life or private or private life right authenticity at home seems important you could be your complete self at home except when you want to you know physically hit your sister or brother because they ate your ice cream that's not the right kind of authenticity no no it isn't I think well there I think it's such a rich and complicated topic I think F first thing is like I I don't want people to be disingenuous ever but I have a real problem with people saying as an excuse for disrespectful Behavior well I was just being myself um I think David sedera said yes but yourself is an so good so good and I think I think what people forget is that we have we all have multiple selves right you you I mean you've you've you've known this your whole career um we all have multiple identities we also could think about yourself as your thoughts your emotions um your values your personality so which facet of yourself are you trying to be true to um I would argue that authenticity without boundaries is careless authenticity without empathy is selfish and part of being authentic is caring about other people's values that should one of your values so what that means concretely is I don't think we should worry about being authentic to what we're thinking and feeling in any given moment I think what we want to ask is what I'm about to do or say consistent with my principles and sometimes that means you will be false to your personality in order to be true to your values sometimes that means you will you will feel like you're not honoring your thought or your emotion in the moment um but you're doing that with a broader view toward who is the person that I want to be there was a cultural critic Lon trilling who wrote about the idea of sincerity as opposed to authenticity and I really like this distinction he said when when you when you try to think about being authentic you're trying to bring the inside out and to point Andrew that's not always appropriate or effective he said sincerity is a little bit more about bringing the outside in so pay attention to the person you claim to be and then try to become that person and that was a little bit of an aha moment for me I realized you know there there are all these people who say well you should you know you should you should walk your talk and I think that's good advice I might even go a step further and say you know maybe you should only talk it if you're already walking it maybe maybe that would help us avoid hypocrisy but I think the the the fundamental message here is that uh we we all we we all could be authentic to one part of ourselves and inauthentic to another part and I think the most important part is to ask what do I stand for and if I'm what I'm about to communicate is not consistent with that then maybe maybe I could self-censor such great advice and um I suppose uh one has to wonder about the the role of a emotional states you know I think there are career-ending mistakes that people make in a moment um especially online nowadays and by the way this is not just for people who are already established in their career I've heard stories and there seem to be more and more of these in the news of of for instance you know videos of things that people said some years earlier getting them ejected from college um a guest on Lex Friedman's podcast who works in the Securities World said that one of the lessons that he teaches his kids is to not film themselves doing bad things but in and of course also not to do bad things but in general to just not film themselves doing anything because of his understanding of the risk of of doing that and we don't want to create a paranoia but um gosh I mean who you are when when you're 14 is a very different person than who you are when you're 27 and when you're 50 so I hope so you know and um so yeah I think you know balancing authenticity across the lifespan and we're expecting young minds to do this and clearly older Minds can't do it either I mean I I this is a pretty well-known case of a chair of a major Psy the major Psychiatry Department um we won't name the university but um basically lost his job for a single tweet he just was not being thoughtful in fact he was being um really um like numb to to other people and lost his job and and I think he Pro I don't know him um and it was obvious why he lost it I don't think it was debatable but um gosh you think about somebody who's a chair of Psychiatry which means they're a psychiatrist which means they're trained to think about thinking and there you go it's amazing how common this is and I think one of the things that's fascinating to me is I guess this goes back to something we were talking about a moment ago but I I think that when when we communicate we have access to the sum total of all of our thoughts and everything we've ever ever said that we can remember and we forget that other people only have a snapshot and so one of the questions I I like to ask is if this was the only post that somebody saw of mine would I be proud of it would I communicate who I am and who I aspire to be oh that's so good if the answer is no maybe I should pause before I put that out there that that is excellent advice if it were the only post like you're one and only representing you oh fantastic that now that could be paralyzing if you're a perfectionist you'll never post but I think for somebody who's posting regularly um it's a good filter to just ask um am I you know am I being thoughtful enough so good I won't add anything to that just say I'll just say so so good let's talk about potential I was in junior high school and I remember having a social studies teacher who she just would go on and on about potential she had a special program after school you could get involved potential potential potential um and we hear about this and you know we have untapped potential you hear we're only operating at 40% of our abilities you know people will say that um the implication is that we have reservoirs of potential that we're just not accessing because we're not doing the right thing thinking the right things um I know you've now researched this topic extensively you have a new book on this topic um tell us about potential like do we all have huge reservoirs of potential that we are not accessing and of course I and everyone else wants to know how can we access those but maybe you could also tell us some of the myths around potential and yeah tell us about tell us about potential such a such a uh sticky topic for all the right reasons thank you I uh you know it's one of those things things where you you've had this experience I'm sure many times where you start thinking and talking about a topic and you realize it's it's been your whole life but you didn't see it until then uh and I feel that way about potential I think that I've been passionate about helping people achieve their potential as long as I can remember I think every every goal I've ever set has been about stretching my potential in one way or another um or at least realizing it and what I've become so struck by as I've studied this topic is we all have hidden potential but we don't know how to unlock it so why do we often underestimate our own potential um we judge ourselves by by our starting abilities um and this is more common for people with fixed mindsets but even people with growth mindsets um you try a new skill it doesn't go well and you think this is not for me I'm not cut out for this um and then it gets worse when other people also you know you're not just underestimating yourself you're also being under underestimated by others other people watch you and say yeah you don't have the you know you're not a prodigy you're not a natural you don't have the talent that it takes and I think the big myth there is that raw talent is the most important driver of How High people climb um it's not motivation and opportunity uh matter more than raw ability for growth motivation and opportunity yeah um you know obviously you know everybody starts at a different point um but how close you come to your potential is much more about the character skills you cultivate um to to improve and improving over time and then whether you're in a situation where you know you you have access to the knowledge that you need and the tools you need to keep growing and so you know a concrete example of this for me is um when I when I started diving I was way too late I picked it up as a teenager uh a lot of the elite divers in the world start by five goodness and actually in China they're they're handpicked by for body type and sent to a version of diving boarding school where they don't even teach kids how to swim uh they tie a rope around them so that they can just pull them back after after they they hit the water in the deep end what part of their body they tie a rope around uh I think it's their waste so they're diving with a rope so that when they get in the water they're not wasting any energy exactly they're just being dragged through the water and out that's uh that's my understanding of it um wow but PR okay they have to walk they have to climb yeah okay so there a bunch of other things they have to do yeah but the the the swimming apparently is very secondary anyway um so I started really late and I lacked most of the things that you would want as a diver um I I couldn't touch my toes without bending my knees uh my teammates called me Frankenstein because I was so stiff when I walked uh so lacking the flexibility I have no rhythm my coach brought a metronome to practice one day and I couldn't even keep the bead uh so you know you think about diving as a sport of Grace nope and then I also couldn't jump and I couldn't twist either and it's like you're missing the explosive power you don't have the the athleticism um and I think if I had if I had just looked at those abilities I had no business being a diver and in fact no business being an athlete I'd already been cut from the Middle School basketball team three times I didn't make the high school soccer team those were the two sports I had poured a decade into like this is going nowhere um Eric just the most incredible coach I could ever imagine he said to me on the first day of practice uh he said um you know yes you're missing all these things but I believe if you if you pour yourself into this sport that you could be a state finalist by the time you finish high school and he saw more potential in me than I saw in myself and that just lit a fire under me and um you know what that translated into is a lot of the behaviors that that you and I have both studied um you know setting specific difficult goals for I want to learn these Dives that seem ought to reach um for uh you know I want to increase my score over the next three meets by 10 points um for I want to learn how to you know all my limitations notwithstanding one thing that I can master that I have total control over is how clean I go into the water um I can get a rip entry so that there's no splash and that's the most important part of a dive and one of the greatest compliments I ever got as a diver was I came out of a meet in um it was couple years and I think I was maybe a junior in high school and uh one of the judges turned to Eric and said all he can do is rip and Eric said so like yes it's awesome it's almost like saying all he can do is win you know it yeah it it was a great backhanded compliment but Eric was like listen he made the dive it has a degree of difficulty maybe he didn't jump as high as he wanted maybe his tight his tuck wasn't as tight as he wanted um but at the end of the day like that dive disappeared straight up and down into the water you can't not give that a seven um and that ended up serving me really well and so I think the the broader lesson here for me was Eric said to me um actually last year uh I never thought about this he said uh I never got close to even qualifying for Olympic trials like I did not have the talent to to be that good but I got way better than I ever expected and uh Eric said to me he said looking back uh he said you got further with less Talent than every any diver I've ever coached and that was so meaningful to me and what it reminded me was um my priest accomplishments were not in the areas where I started out with the most Talent they were in the areas where I had overcome the most obstacles and I think that to me is um really what drives people around potential is to say um it's not performance that's motivating it's a sense of progress I love that story and I and I couldn't agree more I mean I think um Lord knows my favorite Topic in scien is the course I performed at least after my freshman year which was abysmal um least well in the phase when I was doing well what class was it it's neural development I now teach neural development neural development how bad were you it at first uh okay well I have to put it in context my high school and freshman year of college were were abysmal right I basically no place being there I can only thank my high school girlfriend for um being so wonderful that I followed her off to college and ended up there um left after my freshman year came back and then at that point it was like a step function I worked out of fear and excitement and love of the material um I I was a straight A student thereafter but in my senior year senior year excuse me I took a course in neural development which was extremely challenging um and I got a B+ and that B+ still gets me you know but it's a topic that I love the most it's what I did my um graduate thesis on it's what I teached um at Stanford among other topics and um and I like to think now I have I guess humility had considerable Mastery over over the the material but it's because I didn't do as well as I would have liked and I applied myself so much and I think that it just didn't come naturally to me and then eventually over time you you kind of get it or you get um you get it um so it's it but it's still my favorite topic because it was that friction point right it's the ratcheting through and there's something I don't know that's just so intrinsically satisfying to me I used to watch my Bulldog Mastiff Costello like chewing on a bone or when he was little on a brick CU you know he had a kind of a Homer Simpson brain about his object choice to chew on and he but and he just looked like he was in just total Bliss it was like this effort um combined with some intrinsic pleasure of the process and so I think that when one is ratcheting through through something that's hard it feels so good that it's almost better than the outcome like it it it is better than the outcome I I think it is and you know it's it's fascinating because this is why I'm always bothered by people saying plar strengths because if you do that you will gravitate to toward the things that come naturally to you and you're going to miss out on the very often the the skill that was hard for you to learn to your point is one that you end up with greater Mastery over because you had to put in the extra effort and you end up deriving more more satisfaction out of the fact that you know I this was really tough and I figured it out um you know implicit in your story um and maybe partially explicit in in some parts um when I was when I was looking at the character skills that help people realize their potential um and really fuel unexpected growth um I I ended up finding three that I think are under discussed and um and well supported by science um I think that that basically if you want to reach your potential or um you know achieve more than you think you're capable of we're looking at becoming a creature of discomfort um and embracing things that are unpleasant or awkward for you uh that would be the first thing the second is um is being a sponge and soaking up new information and also filing filtering out what might not be useful and then the third is um is being an imperfectionist which is knowing when to aim for excellence and when to settle for good and I I hear all of those themes in your story um I you know that was OB obvious viously uncomfortable like you got a B+ you don't want to do any more neural development not at all it was it was so frustrating and so exciting to me at the same time and then I went everything I did in the five or seven years that followed was all about learning more about this topic because I and it wasn't about performing well or proving myself I just I I love the material so much more because of how challenging it was and I'm grateful to you Ben Reese professor at UC Santa Barbara incredible neuron anatomist and teacher of neural development and and laboratory science ien because um you know I think had I gotten an an a I don't know that I would have fallen in love with it in the same way isn't that weird you wouldn't have had to work at it to discover what was fun about it I imagine no absolutely and it's still one of my favorite topics to teach um and learn about so you mentioned discomfort being a sponge SL filter if I got that right and an imperfectionist um yeah tell me more about the imperfectionist piece because I feel like um I've had students in my lab and I've known people in other domains of life that they're they're absolutely paranoid about shipping something out for the world to see it and of course like no one wants to put stuff out into the world that isn't right and God forbid could be wrong but um or that's going to embarrass us so you can understand why people are perfectionists but I never really understood that the uh the extreme perfectionist like how do they ever do anything and and are they happy people cuz I imagine that they are no I mean this is so Thomas Curran I think is the world's leadest leading psychologist studying perfectionism and if you look at his meta analyses uh perfectionism is a recipe for Burnout and depression and anxiety because you're constantly comparing yourself to an ideal that's unachievable um perfectionists um are not they do get better grades in school slightly but they don't do any better at work than their peers because I think in school you have a predictable outcome uh you have a general sense of what's going to be on a test and if you study hard enough you can come closer to the A+ whereas at work performance is much more nebulous and so what happens to perfectionists a lot of times is they end up um optimizing the things that are predictable and controllable and then you know sort of missing the forest and the trees and I think the you know the the antidotes um as far as I know really have to to do with calibration so you know I talked earlier about um how I like to ask for a zero to 10 to find out you know am I in the ballpark or not well one my biggest liabilities as as a diver was I was never satisfied with my score and one day Eric said to me you know you you hear Olympic judges talk about commentators talk about the perfect 10 that's a misnomer um if you look at the diving rule book a 10 is for excellence not for Perfection there's no such thing as a Flawless dive I can look at Dives that have gotten straight tens and point out 19 things that were wrong with them but they were excellent and so then we had to define the standards of excellence so what I have as a recovering perfectionist somebody who you know just beat myself up constantly in fact I got um we did paper plate Awards on my swim team and one year I was given the if only award and there's a little cartoon in me and it says if only I had pointed my left pinky toe I would have gotten an eight and a half instead of an eight and that was like the story of my my diving career and I did not want to be that person anymore and so one of the things I've learned to do is to when I start anything um you know if I sit down to write a book I'm aiming for a nine uh and the reason for that is I'm going to pour a couple years of you know my work life into this topic um you know hopefully a lot of people are going to read it and I want to make sure it's truly the best work I can produce social media post I'm okay with a seven like if I'm only shooting for a nine I'm not going to post very often because you're nine your ceiling for nine is or your threshold for nine is is so exceedingly it's high yeah and I want it to keep getting higher over time so my idea of a nine today is much more challenging than it was 10 years ago and I think this is this is what people probably don't do enough um especially if you're an extreme perfectionist is they don't realize okay um Let me let me figure out how important this task is and then for this task a six is sufficient uh so that then I can pour my energy into you know pulling the the seven and a half toward a nine where it really matters um and inevitably if you don't do that what you will do is you will get a bunch of nines on things that are completely trivial I went to a high school where we had a couple kids get um perfect on the SAT they were the big like centerfold list of all the early admissions to all the fancy IV League schools definitely was not on that list I don't even know if I yeah I don't even know if I was anywhere uh near that list um probably not um and some of them have gone on to have terrific lives and seem pretty happy and I know a number of them and in contact with them and um I think for some of them that performed exceedingly well on standardized tests early on um I hear a bit more dismay in their in their current life not all but um is there I have to imagine there are data on his sort of early high performance being a seed for challenges later on obviously you don't want the the opposite um the sort of what I guess they refer to now is a you know complete Failure to Launch you know people not meeting the the mileston towards being um self-sufficient adults but um yeah what are some of the dangers of suc ESS when thinking about realizing one's larger potential oh that's such an interesting question um I think yeah I think the data on this go both ways so you know some early success is um you know it's a motivator it builds the kind of momentum you were talking about earlier um you know like there's a goal setting researchers like lock and leam have talked about um The High Performance Cycle where you hit a goal and then that builds your confidence and then you set a more ambitious goal and then you reach it and there's 's this upward spiral over time but there's also a mountain of evidence that achieving your goals can make you complacent uh and there's a sometimes it's called The Fat Cat syndrome where where you end up resting on your laurels and then there are also competency traps where you get good at something and then you keep doing it the way you've always done it and you don't realize the world has changed around you like I'm I'm allergic to the idea of best practices like the moment you call it practice best you've created an illusion that you're done and the moment like think about um pre like a lot of companies had really you know what they thought were effective models for collaboration and all of a sudden their best practices are not feasible because everybody's working remotely uh and they've got to throw that out the window and look for better practices for an evolved world so I think um those are the things I worry about most with early success uh I think that one of the things I would love to see more people do when it comes to reaching potential is um is to figure out what does my failure budget look like so um tell you my experience on this um you know it started I wrote I wrote a first book um gave a TED Talk and pretty soon felt like I was spending 80% of my time saying things I already knew and I was getting typ cast I'm like I'm not learning and growing but I'm also not I don't feel like I'm contributing new knowledge to the world what am I going to do about that and 2018 rolls around I'm like you know what this I'm going to start a podcast and that will be my you know my learning mechanism and I didn't know if it was going to work I didn't know how the medium would work for me I didn't know if people were going to want to listen to my voice I certainly don't um maybe Morgan Freeman likes the sound of his own voice I like I like listening to your podcast I also enjoy listening to yours but you I think everybody hates the sound of their voice I just I just wasn't sure for a lot of reasons whether it was going to work um and then I thought about it and I realized well all of the the pivotal moments in my career have come from taking a risk and I thought that I needed to build the confidence in order to do it and I was reflecting on goal setting research as as one does realized you know like the confidence is going to come through doing it um and so let me try it and I guess what I took away was if I don't if I never fail it means I'm not challenging myself I'm not embracing discomfort um I'm not being enough of an imperfectionist so um I set I actually set a goal that I would start at least one project every year that didn't succeed and let's be clear I'm not aiming for failure what I'm doing is is creating an acceptable zone of failure to know that that's going to motivate some risk taking and some experimentation and hopefully some growth and I know it's hard for a lot of people to do this in their lives especially if you have a you know a super demanding boss um but I think we're we're all better off from a you know a growth and potential standpoint if we you've got you know if you if you succeed on 90% of your projects that should be a hugely successful year if you succeed on 100% I think you're aiming too low what are some of the projects that uh you are currently spinning in the back of your mind that would be fun but uh if you're willing to share um yeah that for you still strike a little bit of a of an anxiety cord like oh no like are you um I don't know are you a musician do you are tun can't keep it beat are you thinking about um becoming a musician or exploring playing music I mean what how the reason I ask it that way is um how far into your discomfort Zone do you reach in order to um in order to challenge yourself because I think that everyone needs to have thresholds like there are a lot of things that yeah I wish I could play a musical instrument frankly but I'm I'm not that motivated to do it mostly because I enjoy hearing other people play music so much that I'm perfectly happy I'm saded yeah there's also enough good music out there you don't have to create it 's definitely a lot of great music yeah um so I think there's like a there's a micro and a macro version of this so on the micro side um in then past year um I I did this work Life podcast for five years where I was you know taking the core of my organizational psychology work and trying to take on a topic and and make it interesting and useful to people and then realizing I was feeling constrained just to focus on work and as a psychologist there are lots of other things I want to take on and so we expanded into um this second show rethinking and I have some experiments I'm tempted to try but I've been really hesitant to do them so um did you watch wrestling growing up ever professional wrestling um I did watch a little bit of it and then for whatever reason in the last year uh my good friend Rick Rubin who's he's like not obsessed but he is a real devotees he's a fan of professional wrestling he had me watch some um WWE but even aew he was explaining that it's basically physical drama he's explaining why it's so intriguing to him and so informative to him and then uh I'm a big fan of of certain genre of music and Lars Frederickson from ransett is a is a huge wrestling fan so now got multiple people that have come into contact with they like telling me all this stuff about wrestling so wrestling seems to be cropping up more and more all right so I don't know the first thing about wrestling I think I caught it a few times as a kid likewise it was Hulk Hogan and a few others passed across screen yeah yep y but the the thing that I remember was loving the tag team matches where you know somebody would get overpowered and then they pull in somebody to help I it would be so interesting if there was a podcast where you take issues that people fundamentally disagree on and you start a debate and then somebody can tag in if they want to challenge an argument and so instead of concent concentrating on the particular guests you have you basically have a problem you're trying to you know to get to the roots of and you're going to have all these people jump in and and hopefully build toward a more insightful perspective on it I have no idea if this is going to work I'd really love to try it and this is the first time I've spoken out loud about it because I'm like I I don't know that I want to like that I want to see that crash and burn and yet like why not like what's the risk I think it's so cool fun right yeah what what topics are are uh are you thinking about covering because I can think of some pretty pretty controversial topics um but I want to know what the ones you're thinking about well I mean I literally just I mean I'm thinking out loud here but one one that I think on the controversial front that would be could be really rich is um to think about policies for Trans athletes in sports that's a controversial topic hugely controversial but also I've I've talked to some experts on this I I've talked to some trans athletes um and the people who are deep in this do not know what they think the policy should be and so I I think actually hearing them talk and you know understanding the complexity of those issues and then you know maybe hammering out what what's a policy you would propose for schools what would you want for you know for Olympic events um I I just think that would be fascinating and I'd love to I'd love to moderate that discussion goodness uh maybe I would I wouldn't I don't want to wait into that one I'm glad you would I wouldn't that seems like one of the most barbed wire topics one could ever um embark on which is exactly why I'm going to put in my vote you absolutely should do this podcast I think it's an amazing idea actually folks put in the comment section on YouTube whether or not Adam should do this podcast and and that topic in particular I think it would be amazing because um one thing that I keep coming back to in my own mind is that a lot of the controversies out there stem from the fact that we very often have individuals pitted against individuals yes and there's so much lost in that um and I think about science and going back to the scientific method where we have subfields pitted against subfields when when you talk about a field like there was huge controversy over the structure of DNA and it wasn't one individual against another what you had are small groups different camps and there was some partial overlap there's also you know if you read the double helix there was also a lot of uh uh comp Behavior people entering romantic relationships just to G information from the other side you know human beings not not at their finest um but in any event small panels arguing competing teams competing I think is um far more interesting and informative than individuals you know butting heads I think so too and I think um you know another another one that I think would be really interesting I mean I'm like people always say great minds think alike no great minds challenge each other to think differently and we just don't do enough of that so I I've been thinking a lot politically like what if we brought together a bunch of people um who are not ideologues but are really interested in pragmatic policy solutions to rewrite the Constitution if we were going to build one today You' like to tackle big stuff I just I know I love it I love it it's a compliment it's a compl I mean what are the odds like I said earlier no weak sauce no weak sauce like you just you're you go right for it I mean these listen these are the issues that people are really activated by because these are really core issues they get down to the autonomic nervous system they're in the hypothalamus as we say but I don't think they should be like I look at these topics and think I just want to get it right like I don't have a vested interest in what the model should be I just know that even the wisest people of 250 years ago we not prepared to anticipate the world we live in today and we ought to be constantly like I don't know I don't think you should live in a world where you affirm your beliefs uh I think the only way you learn is by continually evolving your beliefs and so I guess I'm trying to figure out more ways to catalyze that around issues people care about but I don't care about the issues I care about the stretching of thinking and the improving the way that the world works well I'll tell you if you decide to do this podcast with a tag team form I love that you gleaned it from watching wrestling a couple of times um around these uh very controversial issues uh I promise you that will be one of of the most popular and important podcasts on the planet Earth might be podcasts on other planets I hear that they're you know galaxies far far away with a they may have podcast too may have had them for much longer than we have but um that's uh that's a winner yeah well maybe maybe I'll try it as a little experiment on the rethinking feed and see if it's an unmitigated disaster well you know where my vote lies I I appreciate that so okay so to go back to your question for a second on the macro side I've always thought it would be fun to try to write a Sci-Fi novel and the question I'm wrestling with right now is is that a good use of my time like there are great sci-fi writers out there there aren't that many social scientists communicating about the topics that I do and it feels like it might be I don't know I'm like this is it might be too much of a diversion then again uh according to your words um you had no talent in diving but you exceeded all all uh performance metrics um by by considerable amount uh through motivation and um and opportunity I got that right um I vote Yes uh I'm not I haven't read much sci-fi maybe I need to read read more sci-fi are you a fan of sci-fi I love sci-fi it's it's one of my favorite ways to imagine a better world and also you know prevent a worse one from emerging but I don't know there's a there's a part of me that thinks all right there's a there's Ru Bernstein and colleagues uh did this do you know this research on um Nobel prize winning scientists and what differentiates them from their peers uh no but uh being the son of a physicist and having been surrounded by just by circumstance a number of Nobel Prize winners uh when I was a kid young kid I'm very curious to know what what this research says I mean there there's there are many themes you could glean from it but the the thing that really jumped out at me is uh the Nobel Prize winners were more likely to have artistic Hobbies H Fineman certainly did yep um I mean there's a long list of them but if you break it down in the data it was um they're twice as likely as their peers to play a musical instrument there're seven times as likely to draw a paint they're 12 times as likely to do um poetry or fiction creative writing and get this 22 times as likely as their peers 22 to dance act or yes perform as magicians a former magician I was very excited by this yeah well I wasn't going to ask about magic but let's talk about it I was on uh vacation with every year I take my sister in New York for her birthday and my birthday because our birthdays are close together and we went and saw a magician Mentalist um by the name of AI wind um Azie I think is the correct pronunciation um who just just like the last time I saw absolutely blew my mind there's no way it's not magic of course I know it's not magic but it's um that but my understanding is that there are some things that he and other great mentalists and magicians do where they are not absolutely certain of the outcome they're they're playing it's probabilistic um and so there's a risk and a thrill for them too um and that they're also creating memories and erasing memories and um that's something that we I may host aie on the podcast because he's very effective at creating memories and erasing memories that's a lot of what he does and he has tactics to do that in any event um I wasn't going to ask about magic but I know that you were a professional magician at at one point in your life um and that you you did this presumably because you enjoy doing it um but getting beyond the the sort of uh pull the rabbit out of the hat or pick or identify the card that the person picked out of the the shuffled stack um what is it and what was it about magic that intrigues you does it inform anything about um the work that you do now it does yeah I yeah I think it when I started I was 12 and I was just it was just fun and I was looking for a way to entertain other people and entertain myself in the process and then you know became a challenge can I learn this new skill and can I can I master this trick I think um nerdiest thing I did in college was I started a magic club with David Quang who is a a stellar magician and Cru verbalist as he calls it Cru verbalist he does um magic crossw puzzles essentially that I I can't do it justice you have to see it it's unreal um and I watched him for you know our first performance together and realized one of us is going to make it as a magician and it's not me uh he's he's outstanding anyway um the way it figures into my work now is I think so much of good science communication is misdirection and it's the same skill I use as magician if I told you that the the card you picked was about to disappear from the deck and appear on the window you would not be nearly as intrigued as if it happened by surprise and I think the same is true when when we communicate knowledge I think it's it's actually why so many of my posts you flagged this earlier so many of my posts start with um you know this thing is not what you think it's actually this other thing um I think that you know challenging conventional wisdom questioning assumptions is is what surprises people um and then leads them to think either I have something to learn or Oh no I got to put up a shield because my beliefs are being um challenged or attacked and I think the the art form of magic was always about creating a surprise that would Delight people um as opposed to Leading people to feel like they were tricked or duped or manipulated and so I think the the challenge for me is to say Okay I want to figure out what what we know from Behavioral Science um you know mostly focusing on psychology because that's my core expertise um what do we know that's actually different from most intuition and then how do I explain that in a way that surprises people but leads them to say oh that's so interesting as opposed to that's wrong and then want to fight about it it's almost as if you give them the experience of what you're trying to teach them so that the oh that's wrong can't uh be the available respon response yes because in Magic you know it's it's um everyone knows it's magic just like with professional wrestling Folks by the way it there's there's some prior understanding of of what's going to happen maybe they go off script but I think that's actually I think part of the interest in professional wrestling for those that are extreme fans of professional wrestling is that they almost want to wonder about whether or not some of it is not in the plan like it's a suspension of of real that they seem to enjoy right because if you know something's fake or well we should we should be I should be more careful about my language in with magic like when I went see aie I mean I I don't think it's actual magic but he's able to give the illusion of Magic the real illusion is that it's magic right it's not the illusion of making the card hop to somewhere else in the room um and he is phenomenal and I highly recommend people go see his show if they if they get the opportunity but the I think they're doing a documentary about him now actually there'll be some Netflix stuff as well um but it's the illusion that magic exists That's so exciting um so with science communication yeah I always um aim for four things I don't always achieve them but and I think you do as well uh if I may that um a topic be interesting clear ideally actionable but not always and the the quadfecta is when it's also surprising so interesting clear actionable and surprising sort of is the the ultimate if there's sort of a like a oh I didn't realize that but it's it's hard to find data points that satisfy all four criteria and the surprising is the least important by far um I assume table Stakes is it's rigorous oh well okay sitting underneath all four of those points are uh that it's scci that it's actual science right someone didn't just say it right it's not conjecture or Theory so that means that there's data to support it and that the data were collected with with the appropriate amount of rigor right so there's a there's a reservoir of stuff that sits on underneath as a foundation so G given the the Baseline of rigor how do I find what's interesting clear actionable and hopefully surprising although I would I okay I would make a case there's a classic article that Murray Davis wrote one of my all-time favorites he was a a sociologist who wrote a paper called that's interesting and he opened the paper by saying um ideas live not because they're true but because they're interesting which decimated one of my core beliefs like I I thought it was accuracy that drove people's belief beliefs and he said no ideas live because they're interesting and then he goes to build an index of the interesting to explain when people are intrigued and his case is that most of interest is surprise and he breaks down all the ways that you can turn conventional wisdom upside down you can say that um something you thought was bad was actually good or vice versa you can argue that um something you thought was homogeneous is actually heterogeneous uh you could argue that something you thought was individual was actually a collective phenomenon or vice versa and he he's got this wonderful breakdown of of all the ways of being interesting and he's the one who made the distinction between ideas that challenge weekly held assumptions intriguing you and strongly held assumptions um you know sort of offending you but I think from Davis's View and I think he's right a huge amount of interest is surprise and so but I don't think it's the only driver of Interest so I might I might take your criteria and say okay we start with riger um we want to go to interest Clarity and actionability how do we get to interest let's build a submodel of the fact that drive interest and surprise might be it might have the biggest beta weight in the regression equation um but what else what else drives interest I have a couple hypothesis I want to hear yours um you've been doing this actively um and highly effectively Beyond surprise what else interests people in your content anything that draws on self-reflection for them boom I think we all have an innate desire to better understand ourselves why why we work the way we do why we don't work as well as we would like to in certain domains like some and and cast understanding on on our experiences of others too like oh now it makes sense like a with going back to the the kti episodes but we did several of them so for um I think it's appropriate you know to learn from him that narcissism is Envy it represents a a extreme deficiency in the pleasure um that people narcissists can have an extreme pleasure drive but they they always feel like they have far less than they would like to have and that others have far more of it because don't have that same yearning for it right and so that narcissism at its core is deep envy that to me was like wow you know and to to realize that and to Now understand that all this discussion that you hear out there about narcissist everyone calling other people narcissist that um there are genuine narcissists out there and what they really suffer from is an extreme deficit in pleasure and they're constantly envious of others it reframed everything I thought about narcissists about them being overbearing which they can be and often are um etc etc so I think it's also anything that leads to um like oh I can I can I can navigate narcissist better with that well that I mean that checks all your boxes um it's very surprising because it's not the way we normally understand narcissism but I think you you hit on for me what's the maybe even it's at least as important as surprise maybe more so is self-relevance and it doesn't have to be actionable right it has to in a lot of cases just help you understand or make sense of something that's been puzzling or that's you know that's um you know sort of I I think I'm I'm almost always surprised when I say something from you know here here's here's a synthesis of research here's a metaanalysis and I think it's kind of obvious and people get excited about it because it gave them language to describe something they had felt but they didn't know how to articulate or talk about and I think that I mean I think this is why most of the most popular TED Talks um are about human behavior um because people are interested in people um and if you learn something about you or about others you don't have to immediately do anything with that uh to find it intriguing and even useful um because it enriched your worldview a recent guest on this podcast we haven't aired it yet but um maybe it'll be out by time this this a was with Lisa Feldman Barrett she's um Psy psychologist or neuroscientist right emotion of course yeah and she described um in how in certain cultures there is a language for subcategories of emotions right so you know she described a word in Japanese I don't recall what the word was um that describes the the feeling of sadness that one has after getting a particularly bad haircut something that I don't think you or I uh are familiar with but I'm familiar with from my experience of of romantic partner being like really unhappy about their haircut and you're like you're like you're sad but there but by having a specific word for a specific experience people feel less alone and the feeling passes more quickly in time and and then she gives some other examples uh from German and from you know uh Scandinavian um languages and so forth and I find this so interesting it's like the moment people hear that they are not alone in an experience there's nothing actionable about it but it it creates a cognitive shift thereafter in which they suffer less um or may feel more connected to others I mean I think it's really a beautiful example of of exactly what you're referring to like when we learn about something and we we identify with it it's powerful it's very powerful and I think um psychologists often say name it to tame it um affect labeling is one of the most effective emotion regulation strategies and we when we talked about distraction and reframing earlier I should have said there's a third strategy which is literally just to describe what you're feeling um it it it seems to allow people then to reason with and process whatever they're feeling as opposed to allowing the feeling to control them and I I probably got the clearest sense of this and in um in 2021 um I wrote a New York Times article on um on languishing um the feeling of me or blah and I have never had anything I any article I wrote resonate like this and it just like I all the the PO the post that tag mate were just like it me it me it us and it was like the like one and two word reactions and I I don't think it was the content that mattered to people it was the just having the term um all of a sudden people realized this is originally Cory Keys's research that I was referencing um it had been a light bulb for me to say there's a if you think about the spectrum of well-being this is related to your mental illness versus mental health distinction um those are two extremes of the Continuum and one end we have depression and burnout on another end we have you know well-being and flourishing languishing lives right in the middle as Corey describes it it's the absence of well-being so you're not depressed you still have hope you're not burned out you still have energy but you're not at Peak functioning you're missing a sense of purpose um you feel like you're stagnating and you're empty and you know there was something about just saying the word languishing that led people to to realize yeah that's a thing and of course we're languishing we're standing still in the middle of a a global experiment that no one opted into which violates all rules of consent um by by science last time I checked um but I think that that that's something that that probably is under represented when we're trained to communicate as scientists to say one of the most valuable things we do is we give people language to talk about things and I think that's a massive part of um of your impact is uh this is one of the big things I've learned from you Andrew is I I I used to be a little bit dismissive of um of cognitive Neuroscience in particular I thought understanding the brain has not taught me that much about the mind like being able to you know Trace um uh let's take a simple example like when I read Joe Leo's research being able to trace um you know certain um amydala responses um you know as the root of how people deal with fight ORF flight and and threat I'm like I don't know that that helped me that much like if I could just describe fight or flight do I need the amydala and you've convinced me I was wrong about that because when people have when they understand the um the neurological substrates of their thoughts feelings and actions um they believe them more they're like oh like there is a mechanism for this it's being produced inside my head and even though I can't see it um it's there and it can be studied with the tools of science um I think that's a really big deal and I I really regret the fact that I didn't spend more time on cognitive Neuroscience because I think I'd be a better Psy a better psychologist today oh well again thanks for the kind words I think that um a fortunate evolution in our fields or even field if I may um over the last 10 years is that whereas Neuroscience itself even needs to be subdivided into neur Anatomy and the neurophysiology it's lumped into all Neuroscience but it now includes psychology computational Neuroscience cognitive Neuroscience it's all you know I think I I consider us um you know we have different perspectives and different training obviously but doing a lot of the same things um just uh using different um different dissection tools and different different language based tools and listen what you've done uh I won't even say masterfully I mean just with like extreme virtuosity is to wrap your hands around such an enormous literature related to psychology I mean the human mind and behavior and thought processes and emotions and potential and you know so many topics and to um and to extract the the most valuable gems from that literature and communicate them in a way that anyone can understand and um this is it's an extreme gift uh to be able to do that and it's um and it's clear it's working because like you mentioned this article on languishing which we will provide a reference to or a link to in our caption because I want to go read read that now I mean I'm always struck by this feeling of like am I I'm not tired but you know like I've got tons to do but like why do I just want to like sit here for a and I'm like maybe I need to sit here but then you get into all the like the well okay but you know I need to there's a lot to do there's a lot to get up and go I don't want to waste my life and yeah rest is good too but I think languishing is something that like like I definitely can resonate with that so when I had a bulldog it felt a lot easier to do cuz he was always languishing but uh do you ever just languish or are you busy enough that you you just feel like you're always a forward Center of M I think everybody languishes I think it's part of the human condition and I think it might even be evolutionarily adaptive because I I remember um another sort of uh mind-altering idea I remember reading Randy nessie's argument that mild depression could be evolutionarily functional that you know obviously clinical depression um is debilitating in a lot of ways but you know low grad sadness um Lincoln's Melancholy um we know one of one of the things it can do is broaden your field of vision um and you know for for many people sadness is a signal that something is not working and it can motivate problem solving um it can in some cases um open access to New Perspectives um unfortunately those potential benefits of sadness are often overridden by the motivational cost and also the the fact that you now spend all this time regulating your sadness and wondering why you're sad right and so it's it's hard to harness but um I I had a similar thought about languishing from this perspective to say that you know maybe moments of languishing open us up to change um when we get stuck uh sometimes we realize you have to move backward in order to make progress um sometimes you have to unlearn things that you thought you knew um in order to to keep growing and um I you know I don't a friend of mine said he read my languishing piece and he's like you're not the languishing type I'm like okay maybe maybe everybody's Baseline is different like I I think one of the things I'm I'm really lucky to have is high reserves of energy um but for me languishing is like I felt like I did nothing today um and you know in a typical day like if I'm writing a book I should be able to like write a thousand words I'm proud of and I don't like a single word that I produced or I sat at my blinking cursor like staring at the computer screen and for the eenth time wondered like do they call it a cursor because of all the writers who've cursed it and then I end up like Googling what's the like what are the Latin roots of the word cursor where did this come from and like that is not a good use of time it's like that's not forward Mass that's like I'm spinning so so good yeah I think everybody languishes um and I aspire to do it less often but not never love it what does cursor what is the root of cursor people will look it up put hey folks put it in the put it in the uh comments on YouTube um I did I did look it up oh good okay you'll tell us no no I I feel like there's a there's a footnote in Hidden potential and I'm trying to remember it comes from um kurer I think and um the cursor um originally came nope I don't want to do it I'm going to skip it I don't remember this is your Hipp your hippocampus is smart enough to have discarded that information and you have more important things to do forgive me for asking the question folks put in the comments on YouTube so good I have one more question about potential you have children correct three um and a lot of our listeners either are children or have children um and even for those that don't have children I'm curious with the vast array of knowledge that you now have about potential and the fact that kids are these incredible sponges right they I mean they they certainly experience discomfort we know that they are sponges we absolutely know that sometimes they're filters we try and teach them to be filters and and hopefully they are imperfectionists maybe there are kids that are just perfectionists by default but I have to imagine that they aren't because standards come about when we become aware of other people's performance right what sorts of messages do you recommend parents give their kids and what sorts of messages are you actually implementing that perhaps are different than you uh were prior to researching and writing your book on potential o interesting well the first thing I should say is um Becky Kennedy Dr Becky is my favorite source of insight on parenting and she's changed the way I think of the way I think about a lot of what I do with our kids um but my wife Allison is she her instincts about effective parenting are so sophisticated I feel like every day I learned something from watching her communicate with our kids and so I I came in thinking all right write this book about potential I'm not going to do a parenting chapter because I want everything to be relevant to parents and um sure enough there's a chapter that had nothing to do with parenting where I like oh I actually um I'm reading this research and there was a moment where I did something well and I didn't even mean to do it um and this is something that I think everyone um probably underutilizes I don't want actually that's an over statement I think a lot of people um don't appreciate the importance of of this approach to Parenting um and I am trying to do it more often so um quick quick story and then I I'll back up into the principes so I was uh I was getting ready to give my first T talk a number of years ago extremely nervous um I'm a shy introvert I was for a long time afraid of public speaking I remember in college literally shaking um to raise my hand uh being that nervous and now I'm supposed to get in the red circle um not my idea of comfort zone and I happen to mention to our oldest daughter that I was nervous and I asked her for advice on what I should do and she said I think I think at the time let's see she must have been think she was seven maybe I think seven uh maybe six anyway um she said uh look for a smiling face in the audience [Music] so it was it was one of those moments where I'm like oh that's such a good idea um why didn't I think of that like yes I can do that I know people who are going to be in the audience so I asked a couple of friends to sit in the front rows and I I locked eyes with a couple of them and my nerves went down a little bit so a couple weeks later um Joanna's getting ready to be in a school play and she's also shy and introverted and she's nervous and she asks us for advice and instead of telling her what to do I said well what did you suggest to me a few weeks ago and she she remembered and she said look for a smiling face and it it was it was one of like the It was one of the most moving moments um of my life like Allison and I got to the play and she looked at us and she beamed and I just um I I think what I learned from that experience was uh kids need to feel that they matter and most of us think about mattering as um you know showing kids that they're unconditionally loved and giving them the support they need but we forget that part of feeling that you matter is feeling that you make a difference so as a kid feeling like you have something to contribute as a parent asking my daughter for advice that boosted her confidence and I think that this is um I've come to call this the coach effect uh it's one of my favorite recent findings in Psychology that uh when when you're struggling with something um your instinct is to go to somebody else for advice and say I need guidance the problem is that keeps you in a passive frame of mind uh it makes you feel like you're dependent on others what you're better off doing is finding somebody else with a similar Challenge and giving them advice and what that does is it it shows you that you have something to give um it boosts your efficacy um the research on this by Lauren esis Winkler and colleagues uh is fascinating so people who give advice instead of receiving it um randomly assigned end up uh more motivated and more confident um and I think this is something every parent could do right whatever challenge you think your kid is going to face find a version of it that you're grappling with and seek their guidance on it and when they run into that same challenge they will have confidence that they can begin to figure it out on their own and you can be a coach in that process as opposed to just telling them what to do which they may feel like is not relevant or they may resist because they don't want to be told what to do by a parent so that is my favorite parenting lesson from hidden potential I love that and I love your statement that you know kids like adults want to matter you know that being you know we hear you know make them feel important but so often that's tied to Performance metrics and those performance metrics are the very things that are making them nervous or that are creating anxiety um I love it um are you taking additional kids for adoption because I'm I'm raising I'm raising I'm raising my hand I think there'd be a lot more developmental psychologists in the world if uh if we chose our careers later super interesting topic and by the way I'm very much looking forward to reading your book uh hidden potential um clearly I have a lot to resolve around that issue because um I still hear Miss Rolf in the in uh Middle School just telling me how much potential we have and that um and that I wasn't accessing mine oh no it's like a voice in the back of my head um all the time and um even though I feel very happy with um U many aspects of my life that there are a lot of things that I want to do that I haven't done and I think it's through uh you know limit limited uh what are they call limiting self- beliefs or things of that sort self limiting belief self-limiting beliefs there you go I can't even say say the phrase um yeah I do I do think all your fans are like yeah that Andrew huberman really hasn't he hasn't really tapped his potential at all he's squandering at all well keep in mind i' I've lived in a fairly narrow trench of of pursuit you know at 19 I got into this and I've been doing this like researching and teaching and doing res like for PR much all I've done for like almost you heading to 30 years so and you too you've been in this in this game for a long time and that's it's where we like to play but um but what I've learned from you today in addition to many other things is that um realizing our potential uh has so much to do with you know reaching outside we hear about our comfort zone but it's also reaching into our like deeper wishes and thoughts and uh I I keep coming back to this idea of the tag team podcast and and the origins of that in your mind it's like I never would have expected that but it also reveals something that sounds kind of like intrinsic to you like you maybe you like to see things play out uh the way you think they should be played out as opposed to the what's clearly a um intractable Battle of loggerheads least yes that is a that's a core value like I think there I can't imagine an unsolvable problem oh I love that man I want your I want your brain um listen Adam I want to thank thank you first of all for taking the time today to come talk to us certainly not just about your book but we covered an enormous range of topics I mean you talked to us about procrastination which is sort of the third rail of life for so many people uh creativity intrinsic extrinsic motivation and uh blind spots authenticity and and so much more but also I want to thank you for being such an an active teacher on social media in the classroom you still run a research program you're doing TED Talks you're writing multiple books you know you're absolute Phenom in terms of the the amount of information that you're putting out into the world and I must say I always always always learn from your posts your podcasts your books like there are certain people in the world they're exceedingly rare but you're one of them that when they open their mouth people learn and they learn valuable knowledge and it it's a it's a incredible thing um to be on the receiving end and so I just want to say uh on behalf of myself and everyone else thank you ever so much for what you do and um please keep going well thank you that that means a lot to me considering the source because I I the sentiments are mutual uh I think every time I whether it's reading one of your posts or seeing one of your reals um I my overwhelming thought is that is a master teacher and if I had been lucky enough to take one of your classes I might have gone more of the Neuroscience Direction well um and then failed but it would it it would have been interesting to learn more about at minimum and uh I just have tremendous admiration for your commitment to Making Science um interesting clear and useful to people thank you well I consider us on the on the same team in in that regard and um and I I probably will uh tap you about a potential collaboration it would be so much fun to sounds like a bless to work together um meanwhile again thank you for everything you're doing and um like I said just keep going and please come back again I feel like there are a thousand other topics we could talk about and that we should honored we'll try not to make you regret that thank you thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Dr Adam Grant if you're learning from Andor enjoying this podcast please subscribe to our YouTube channel that's a terrific zero cost way to support us in addition please subscribe to the podcast on both Spotify and apple and on both Spotify and apple you can leave us up to a five-star review please also check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and throughout today's episode that's the best way to support this podcast if you have questions for me or comments about the podcast or guests or topics that you'd like me to consider for the hubman Lab podcast please put those in the comment section on YouTube I do read all the comments not on today's episode but on many previous episodes of The hubman Lab podcast we discuss supplements while supplements aren't necessary for everybody many people derive tremendous benefit from them for things like improving sleep for hormone support and for Focus to see the supplements discussed on the huberman Lab podcast you can go to live momentus spelled o us so that's Liv mous.com huberman if you're not already following me on social media I am huberman lab on all social media platforms so that's Instagram X threads LinkedIn and Facebook and on all those platforms I discuss science and science related tools some of which overlaps with the content of the hubman Lab podcast but much of which is distinct from the content on the huberman Lab podcast again it's huberman lab on all social media platforms if you haven't already subscribed to our monthly neural network newsletter the neural network newsletter is a zeroc cost monthly newsletter that includes podcast summaries as well as toolkits the toolkits are brief PDFs that you can download that give you tools for things like neuroplasticity and learning for managing dopamine for enhancing sleep for physical performance flexibility deliberate cold exposure and on and on to join the neural network newsletter you simply go to huberman lab.com go to the menu tab scroll down to newsletter and enter your email we do not share your email with anybody once again thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Dr Adam Grant I hope you found the conversation to be as informative and practical as I and last but certainly not least thank you for your interest in [Music] science

Channel: Andrew Huberman

Views: 2,632,729

Keywords: andrew huberman, huberman lab podcast, huberman podcast, dr. andrew huberman, neuroscience, huberman lab, andrew huberman podcast, the huberman lab podcast, science podcast, adam grant, procrastination, emotion, curiosity, creativity, motivation, intrinsic motivation, sense of purpose, extrinsic rewards, social media, quiet time protocol, chronotypes, morning creativity, movement, stillness, idea filtering, feedback, constructive criticism, second score, growth mindset

Id: 3gtvNYa3Nd8

Length: 192min 22sec (11542 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 27 2023