Legendary Psychologist Adam Grant on Why Leadership is All About Humility, Integrity and Adaptation

[Music] i hope you enjoyed this episode brought to you by our sponsors at mack weldon for 20 off your first order visit mackweldon.com tom and enter promo code tom at checkout enjoy the episode hey everybody welcome to impact theory today's guest is organizational psychologist adam grant he's a four-time new york times best-selling author who's been called one of the top 10 most influential management thinkers of our time he's been ranked wharton's number one professor for seven years running and is one of the most sought after speakers on the planet additionally this former junior olympics diver was named by fortune magazine to their prestigious 40 under 40 list and everyone from bill gates and richard branson to j.j abrams and malcolm gladwell have praised his work and his ted talks together have a collective view count north of 20 million views adam welcome to the show man thanks for that tom i can assure you it's all downhill from here that's hilarious it's uh it's funny how hearing one's accomplishments strung out like that can sound very weird at times but it is pretty impressive man like what you've been able to do is um is is pretty extraordinary and what i love is that it comes from a pretty aggressive approach to getting people to tell you what you're doing wrong so that you can get better and right now we are living through some extraordinarily um interesting times the the tables being overturned we're in the middle of a lot of protesting there's going to be just tremendous change hopefully a tremendous change taking place and to get us through that kind of change well we're obviously going to need a lot of tremendous leadership and i was wondering in your research i know that you've focused heavily on what are sort of the universal principles of leadership and i'd love to start there like what do you think makes for a great leader oh where did we begin how many hours do you have time as many as you'll give me to be honest all right i'm here uh i i have not a lot else on my agenda today so um you know when when i think about leadership the first thing i want to do is i want to break it down into values and skills and i think the for me the values are table stakes right so you can't lead if you're a taker rather than a giver if it's all about you as opposed to saying look i care more about my people and the mission we're trying to advance than i do about glorifying myself uh so that'll be the first value i'd put on the team so before we before we move off that one just give people a quick breakdown of givers versus takers you have a whole book on it it's really extraordinary um you talk about the three types i think it'd be useful for people to understand that yeah happy too so when i think about your style of giving and taking the question is just when you interact with somebody new what's your default instinct is it to give and say what can i do for you to take and think about what can you do for me or to match and say okay can we trade some kind of favor and what i found over and over again is that most people default to matching they don't want to be too selfish or too generous and yet in the long run the most successful leaders especially are the servant leaders who are interested in helping others with no strings attached and who will put other people above their own narrow self-interest and so i think that's just that's a must-have in leadership and it's far more rare than i would like it to be fair um i think beyond that i think a second attribute i look for in leaders value-wise is humility to recognize your shortcomings but also be motivated to overcome those shortcomings it's it's not that helpful if you can say yeah i can i can make a list of the 19 weaknesses that i have but i don't care about fixing any of them right i think being an effective leader is is heavily about striving for self-improvement and the third value i put on the table is integrity it's a consistency between your words and your deeds and a lot of people will say look you know you you have to practice what you preach i actually think leaders should be doing the the reverse which is to say i am only going to preach what i already practice and if we could just get leaders who value generosity humility and integrity i would be overjoyed and then we get to skills all right so before we go on to skills let's talk about those in a little more depth so one of the things i found interesting in the book um is when you're talking about takers givers matchers that you said the interesting thing about givers is that they represent both ends of the spectrum so you see some of the least successful people are givers and then the most successful people are givers and so i'd love to know how to use it functionally and when it sort of metastasizes and becomes a problem yeah so if you look at the differences between failed and successful givers they break down into the question of of actually it's three questions one who do you help two when do you help and three how do you help and what you see with failed givers is they're basically self-sacrificing so they're helping all the people all the time with all the requests which is a recipe for burnout it's also an easy way to get burned by takers what you see with successful givers is they're more thoughtful about their helping choices and they say look i will do whatever i can to support people who are either generous or fair right givers or matchers but if somebody has a history or reputation of selfish behavior then they might be a taker and so i'm to be a little bit more cautious with them and set some boundaries one because i don't want to reinforce that behavior and reward it and two because they're going to take advantage of me and prevent me from helping the people who are going to pay it back and pay it forward and then you also see that successful givers are more likely to say okay i'll block out time for my own agenda and own priorities because i want to be ambitious around my own goals not just around helping other people and yeah if it's an emergency i will show up and help you but otherwise i have some priorities that i need to take care of here so i will be available to you when you know when it's not going to be a huge cost to me and then they're also careful about helping in ways that energize them and where they add distinctive value so you see a lot of failed givers becoming jacks of all trades and you know pretty soon they get a reputation for being capable and helpful and then no good deed goes unpunished whereas the successful givers are more likely to say look i've got a couple ways of helping that i really like and that i excel at and i'm gonna focus on those so that i can add more value and so when i do help it's energizing to me as opposed to exhausting one of the things i found in a company context and i don't i'm not even sure yet how applicable this is to the greater time that we're living through right now um but when i think about trying to provide leadership in a company context it's it's a pretty interesting dynamic when you talk about humility where you do have to have a degree of certainty you have to have a degree of like being able to step out front to galvanize everybody's attention hopefully not on yourself but you're galvanizing it on a vision and you have to get everybody pointed in the same direction i often talk about one of the things i think that leaders really have to do is you have to understand how to generate momentum so we're in a moment right now where if we can capitalize on the sort of emotional momentum that we have point it in a direction that is um ultimately bringing everybody together and is um is thoughtful in terms of the long-term outcome that we want to have that that could be such a powerful moment but getting everybody to move in the same direction is is a difficult task without getting people to stare at you so you want them to stare at the idea right you don't want them to over focus on you but somebody has to present it somebody has to present it with clarity and get everybody going keep them enthusiastic keep that energy level up and so the type of person and you've talked really powerfully about this the type of person that is drawn to that can often spill into the narcissistic right they enjoy the attention and so some of what they're seeking is that and i'm just curious how how somebody who really wants to help they really want to help sustain that momentum they want to be a beacon of hope in this time how do they make it about the mission and not about themselves i think that's such an important question tom and i love how you've you've highlighted that distinction um i think that you know for me it comes down to promoting your ideas not yourself and when i look at how leaders do that effectively one of the things that really surprised me is sometimes the message doesn't even come from them so as an example years ago i was studying fundraising callers and they were trying to bring in donations to a university and the the leaders were trying to motivate them because this is hard work right you you interrupt people's dinner you try to convince them that no your tuition was not enough you should keep sending money into the university and now you should get nothing back for that donation uh so they got yelled at a lot they you know they shouldered a lot of complaints and the leaders tried to talk about why the money was important and where it was going and the callers just they looked at that and they said wait these these managers have an ulterior motive they want to motivate me to work harder and bring in more donations and so you know i don't really buy into this whole story they're telling me so what some of the leaders did then was they actually outsourced inspiration and they said okay you know why why do we have to be the megaphone what if instead we bring in some scholarship students who could talk about being the first-hand beneficiaries of the money that's being raised by this call center and so we ended up designing some experiments together and lo and behold it turned out that that message was much more compelling coming from the end user who could say look you know i i might not have been able to afford tuition and because of the work that you all do i am in college today and really show that sense of appreciation as opposed to managers doing it themselves and so i think sometimes one of the best ways to energize people is to shut up say instead let me find the you know if i've got a mission here it's probably affecting some group of clients or customers or patients or end users and let me bring their voices front and center yeah i love that notion of sometimes what you need to do is listen that's one of my rules about being a leader is you really have to listen i read nelson mandela's extraordinary book long walk to freedom and in that he talks about his father who was sort of a local chief in his village and he said that he would always listen before he would speak and he would make sure that everybody else had their opportunity to air their ideas to air their grievances and only after that would he come in and say okay here's what i think that we need to do to move forward so i'm a big believer when you read something if it hits you and you think that this is a useful thing that you should be deploying that you deploy it immediately i love the reference to mandela uh because the one thing that's always stuck with me from from his writing is the idea that a leader is like a shepherd if if you watch a shepherd with a flock the shepherd is is rarely out front right you will often see a bunch of sheep leading the way and the shepherd is kind of taking care of the stragglers there's a great organizational psychologist victor vroom who incidentally his license plate says room on it which is just just how could it not how could a detail right i would do that if that were my name so uh one of the things that victor studied for years was the the tension between being a directive leader and a participative leader and he said one of the fundamental mistakes that a lot of leaders make is they they develop a style and then they stick to that style but the whole point of leadership is flexibility and adaptability and so you can't just say well i'm a i'm either an empowering leader or i'm more of an authoritative leader you actually have to be willing to adjust your style to fit the situation and so what he was really interested in is is how do you flex effectively and he found that there are a bunch of conditions that really matter a few that stood out for me one relative expertise is huge right so when i look at effective leaders one of the things i see over and over again is they know what they know they know what they don't know and in situations where they have more knowledge than their team they're comfortable in the driver's seat when they don't know what they're talking about they'll step back and move into the passenger seat some others were around getting by and saying okay you know the more critical it is for people to you know to really get behind this mission the more i need to hear their voices and give them a say if people are already bought in then you know that i can i can kind of lead um and i think that when i think about leaders who've done this really effectively the the examples that come to mind all follow a common meeting structure which is to open up by saying look here's the objective of the meeting does anybody have any feedback on that before we go forward okay once we're aligned on the objective now i want to go around and hear everybody's independent view before i share mine and then at the end i'm going to try to synthesize add my perspective and then move us toward a decision and what i like about that is the leader is still providing some guidance and direction but the leader is actually not disclosing hey you know here's where i stand and that way we don't run into this conformity or group thing problem i like to effect where the highest paid person's opinion the moment that's known everyone wants to jump on the bandwagon yeah you you cut out right as you said it but it's the hippo effect if i remember correctly i just want to make sure people hear that such a interesting concept so we we hit the first part of your leadership which is super powerful now talk to me about skills like what are skills that a leader should be developing yeah so when i break down leadership into skills i think obviously decision-making skills are critical we started talking about those already um and i think decision-making skills have to do with being willing to hear dissenting views right being willing to confront perspectives that maybe bruise your ego a little bit in order to learn and then in order to gather better information and make better choices can you give people an example because this may be the most the thing that i've taken most deeply away from your work is this because this dude of all the powerful things that you have already said and will say in the rest of this time this how to improve yourself to me is is at the the foundation of the human experience so why have you become so dogged in your pursuit of critical feedback i mean from my perspective it's the only way you get better if if people just praise you over and over again you're only going to repeat the excellence you've already achieved and you hit a plateau and then you're you're done great how exciting is it to just say okay i i've peaked already i'm gonna just try to maintain that level uh what i wanna do is i wanna keep getting better uh and i think to me it's it's so much better to be on an upward trajectory than it is to you know to flatline at some level uh or to stagnate and so i i think that that requires short-term sacrifices and it's a little bit like the you know the professional version of what you just you described you know in a personal relationship which is if i want to if i want to achieve whatever potential i'm capable of um i have to be willing to hurt myself uh in the moment in order to you know to be a little bit stronger tomorrow i mean it's a lot like weight training right you you know you have to tear a muscle in order to build it into you know into a stronger muscle and so i feel like we should think about our skills and our capabilities the same way that we do you know our bodies in that sense so i guess this is something i learned first as an athlete uh not a real athlete mind you just a springboard diver but i've seen footage of your springboard diving it's pretty impressive uh it would be a lot more impressive if i was a little bit more talented uh and a little bit less less stubborn but one of the things that i learned as a diver right away was i couldn't see myself in the air right and so what i would feel when i was flipping or twisting or even when i was entering the water was completely different in many cases from what the judges would see and so you know very early on i became extremely dependent on my coach and then also on video to really try to process the the disconnect between what i thought i was doing and what was coming across and that as i moved into you know into work life that became sort of a metaphor for what we all deal with um you know i think we definitely have we all have bright spots right which are strengths we can't see but we have also lots of blind spots which are weaknesses that we don't have have access to and so what i wanted was the clearest possible rear view mirror to say if i can't see in that then you know i can't really figure out what i need to learn and what i need to get better at so um i started doing this in the classroom where you know i would just have students fill out feedback forms first when i gave guest lectures then when i started teaching classes i just said tell me everything you want me to do more of and everything you want me to change and then i would just share all the feedback with them verbatim which was my own version of radical transparency i guess and then we can have a thoughtful conversation about how i can fix those problems and improve upon those you know those areas of weakness and that became a conversation that really turned the students i was teaching into my coaches which was immensely helpful and made me much less awful at public speaking than i was when i started dude i love that going back to what you were saying about in athletics so i used to skateboard i will put that very lightly i used to enjoy standing on a board with four wheels is probably a more accurate description and i remember trying to learn how to ollie and i'd finally gotten good where i could all eat pretty high i was really proud of it and then the kids that i was skating with are like you do know that your back wheels never leave the ground right and i was like what what are you talking about that that's not possible i'm alling hi i legitimately did not believe them i'm like when you talk about how it feels inside versus what it actually looks like outside i was like i can feel it man i'm like really doing this and so they said let me film you and they filmed me and i wasn't only my front wheels were coming up i could not fathom that that feedback was real and because of that disconnect and so getting that objective look at myself was really transformative at the beginning you said that you'd be a better diver if you were less stubborn what did you mean by that i remember one day i was i was just trying to do a front dive with a half twist so you take off you're going in the water and then you kind of turn into a back dive and i had i guess a mental image of where the twist happened that defied the laws of physics and by the way my diving coach was a physics teacher and i still argued with it right i was so sure that i was right because i felt like i was turning over one way and he said okay i'm just gonna have to show you the tape because you won't believe me and my teammates were making fun of me and you know i wasted an hour and a half of that practice but that became a microcosm for a series of mistakes that i was making which is i was so determined to be right that i was standing in my own way of getting it right and so i i decided i was going to be really quick moving forward to admit when i was wrong about something and then try to improve upon it and that's i guess that's become a metaphor for how i try to with my life oh my god you have to talk about shane please tell us a story because it is so crazy and so perfect for how i think people should approach life yeah so i think anybody who hasn't heard of shane battier uh there's a reason for that um if you know if you don't follow basketball closely uh shane shane was a superstar for his whole career uh he was the player of the year in high school he was the captain of the duke national championship team and then he got to the nba and discovered that pretty much everybody there was more physically talented than he was people would complain that he was too slow he couldn't dribble and this was a real liability if you want to be one of a few hundred people in the world who can play professional basketball and so what shane did this was first captured by michael lewis a wonderful article called the no stats all-star was he said okay i'm gonna master the intangibles and some of that is obvious right i'm going to dive for loose balls i'm going to you know i'm going to take shots that that are really critical for the team even though they don't bring me a lot of glory necessarily but he also said you know what i'm going to master statistics and i'm gonna find the one spot on the chord that you know that the guy i'm guarding tonight can't shoot from and i'm gonna force him there and i'm also gonna figure out where you know where my game is optimized by studying what the gaps in my team are and then figuring out how i can fill it and if you think about that that is the nexus of you know of generosity and humility right he's shane is asking how do i make my team better right it's not about me i want to i want to contribute to a championship team and he's asking how do i reinvent myself in order to you know to become the player who adds that kind of value and you know if you look at the data he was one of the most effective players on a court in the sense that there's a huge discrepancy between how well a team performs when he's on the bench versus when he's playing even though he doesn't have you know a crazy number of points scored or assists or rebounds or shots blocked and i think that that's that's something we need in every team i think it's you know somebody who's there to say there is no task that's beneath me and if the leader is that person that has a huge cascading effect dude that like you want to talk about something that leaders need to be able to do it's nothing is beneath you another stat in basketball you've talked about which is teams that have the most all-stars tend to perform the worst which i think is is really pretty interesting if you have a whole team of all-stars they're less likely to want to do that right everybody wants to take the game-winning shot and so yeah there are studies both in basketball as well as in in professional soccer showing that if you have a team of more than about 60 superstars your odds of winning a championship or having a highly successful season go down because you're missing the role players and so whenever i hear a ceo say well i only hire a players i think well you know what there's a lot of important work that a players don't want to do and so i think that's the wrong mentality i think the the evidence would tell us that an a team is actually composed of a and b and c players i'm excited to tell you all about our sponsor mack weldon mack weldon 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dude i am so desperate to get phil jackson on the show i don't know if you read his book 11 rings but oh man when he talks about how we weren't winning championships when jordan was just the best player in the nba we started winning championships when he became a leader and when he realized you can't just punch people in the face and hope that that is going to take you like that it will inspire them to elevate their game he was like you have got to find a way to connect with these guys to bring them together and he said when i was able to focus him on leadership and really being a leader then we start taking off and he was like look he was still michael he was still super hardcore but in recognizing that he wasn't going to be able to win by himself and you know i think that speaks to your earliest point about the best leaders being servant leaders and being able to recognize how they have to give and not just take is pretty extraordinary yeah one of the the questions i've gotten really interested in lately is the question of leader emergence so you've got a team and you have different levels of ability um and then you know somebody steps up and becomes the the informal leader what drives that and you know sometimes it's just the most competent person but often it's it's what psychologists would call prototypicality which is to say what does the group stand for and then who's the person who's most likely to exemplify uh the essence or the identity of the group and i think that's that's something that very few people stop to think through when you know when they either start a new job or when they build a team is to say okay if i were to make a list of the values that are distinctive central and enduring to this team or to this company what are they and then how do i make sure that i represent the most core values all right now we have to talk and i fear that i am misremembering the words you use but cognitive entrenchment that's close deal with available entrenchment so when i think about cognitive entrenchment there was a brilliant paper that eric dain wrote about this and he said look you know we we generally assume that the more expertise you gain the more creative you're going to be and yet if you study the relationship between expertise and creativity it's not linear it's curvilinear uh there's such a thing as being too knowledgeable like wait how how could that be wait i ju i should i should stop learning no what he's saying is that oftentimes when you get really deep in a domain you start to take for granted assumptions that need to be questioned and you don't even know you're taking them for granted you're like a fish that doesn't realize it's in water and there's some really funny demonstrations of this like expert bridge players if you change the rules up on them they actually perform worse than a lot of novices do or if you take really skilled and experienced accountants if uh if you look at how they adjust to a tax law they're slower to adapt than people who are just learning the accounting trade and you know those are examples of cognitive entrenchment right people get they get sort of accustomed to a particular way of thinking and solving problems and then they don't want to undo that and i worry a lot about that i think that you know organizations you're starting to talk about organizations get entrenched too right this is the way we've always done it well that will never work around here um and those those to me are are some of the great warning signs that a culture is in danger of groupthink um i think the first thing to do is to run run the exercise of asking what's missing from our culture uh if you know if there's a pattern of behavior a routine a way of thinking that we wish we had but we didn't what is it and then how do we go out and find people who excel at that how do we collectively and you know adjust our behaviors a little bit to move in that direction um i think ideo did this beautifully so you you know ideo of course tom um i um i knew them originally as the the company that invented the mouse for apple and they've done all kinds of creative work since then as as a great design consultancy and after a while they realized you know we have a lot of engineers and designers but we're getting called into these weird worlds and we're not really sure how to solve the problems that we face in those worlds like they were tasked to redesign a shopping cart in a grocery store and then to reimagine sesame street as a tv show they're like this is not mouse building anymore we need to figure out how to how to learn about a new world really quickly and so they actually created a new job that was called anthropologists and they said look this is what anthropologists do for a living they go out into foreign cultures and they make sense of them and they bring that understanding back and so they literally went and hired anthropologists because they discovered there was a skill set they were missing in their culture which was very design and engineering focused and i think that exercise could be run in every company and it's a great way of identifying those gaps and then not getting entrenched what's what's your take how do you think about solving that problem so one i think everybody has to agree on what their goal is so part of what i try to do is make sure that core values that are innate to the person that we hire are already there so if somebody doesn't like i i think that you have to filter to a large extent and so the question is what do you filter for and i think most people filter for skill set it's very easy to put on a resume it's much easier to test in an interview but the thing that we filter for is do you have a growth mindset and i feel like that is one of the most fundamental things i get asked a lot about like hey i want to be in a relationship like you and your wife like how do i do it and i'm like 80 of the battle is selection and if lisa didn't have a growth mindset or i didn't have a growth mindset and we weren't willing to get better and improve um then it would be nightmarish and you end up one of you grows typically and the other doesn't and you know it becomes this real drama so looking for people that have a growth mindset so at the core all i have to do is appeal to that right so as you were talking about what people have to do to improve a culture my belief is your current skill set or your current culture however you want to think of it has already taken you as far as it's going to take you so if you're happy where you're at and like you said earlier and you're comfortable being in that plateau forever then hey yeah you already won but my thing is i'm not and certainly in a business if you're not growing the odds of you getting supplanted by somebody who comes out of left field with some new innovation that you're just going to get beaten to death so i'm i appeal to those sort of just they are the physics of being human they are the physics of running a company you have to be improving um as a person the meaning of life is to see how many skills or how much potential you can turn into actual usable skills so it's like i would be asking all right as we try to evolve this culture and somebody offers an idea i would say how does it make us better and any sort of measurable way is it going to help us innovate so that we don't get supplanted by a new player is it going to allow us to do more with less like what what is the outcome that you're trying to get because i find that in life people steer by a vague sense and you have to migrate them away from a vague sense into something that is articulatable into a very specific goal with a timeline how much exactly what those three elements being critical to a goal and then having an informed hypothesis about how to get there and the informed is the key part and so we've broken down what i call the physics of progress and we've turned everything into sort of a stateable formula which is the most effective way to do insert goal is to insert what i call a lever action a binary thing that you either do or don't do it isn't incumbent upon the outside world to give you anything it's like either we do this or we don't and so that's our informed hypothesis i know enough about it you know to say i think this will work but i know enough about the realities of myself and the world to know i can't guess at whether this will actually work i have to test it i love formulating that as a hypothesis because i i've seen so many companies get in the trap of of declaring the best practices and then never questioning them until it's too late and i think what you've just outlined is a really effective way to keep learning yeah and and at an institutional level it becomes harder because you have so many of the a company is not a nameless faceless entity it it is entirely the sum total of the actual human beings that make up that company so if at the individual level you have a sickness which could be cognitive entrenchment then the organization is going to have that same sickness of cognitive entrenchment so it's trying to find a way to boil this down where everybody can take ownership of it and make those changes be focused on the same desired outcome which is constant self-improvement in our company otherwise you there's so much inertia to staying the same you just won't be able to get out of it because everybody has that vague sense and and i find that's the the most prototypical human sickness is a vague sense i have like what do you want to do is perfect to speak to an olympic diver what do you want to do i want to win a gold medal and that is where i promise you most people stop i want to win a gold medal awesome in what the olympics yes the olympics amazing summer or winter summer fantastic swimming diving tennis like where are we at here and then you get all the way down to i want to be you know the 10 meter um springboard champion or what i'm not even sure that's the thing but like you get the idea you you know exactly word would scare the hell out of everyone so you you know specifically what you want to do and therefore you know specifically what you have to get good at do you ever feel like people get exhausted by constant self-improvement um i i'll speak for myself i've never i haven't been thoughtful enough to ask that question so where i come down on this is like you talking about okay somebody telling me that i move like a muppet it sucks in the short term but obviously your behavior tells me that you're focused on the long term like what can be gained from your improvement the fact that you become one of the most recognized thought leaders in the space the fact that you're seven years running the number one um ranked professor at wharton i mean it's the the results speak for themselves and so the way i think about it in my own life is i have so mentally conditioned myself to get a dopamine rush from somebody pointing out a flaw because i'm thinking you have no idea my adam i have the chills because i know how true what i'm about to say is i'm willing to actually take the pain of that and then go if i can improve this i'll now be a step farther ahead and on a long enough timeline i can win at anything because i'm i'm willing to do that constant iteration so there are definitely things that i do in my life where for sort of brief periods of time i'm not thinking about getting better but honestly man they're they're really few and far between and i have i have this thing in my life where it is for 15 years because i was trying to build a business so i could build a film studio long story i didn't watch movies because it it wasn't the skill that i needed at that moment and then i found that that carried over even when i was building the studio i wasn't watching movies anymore because i'd gotten into such a habit and i found that they didn't make me feel like i was getting better and so i couldn't do anything that didn't make me feel like i was getting better because the conditioning i'd put under myself to have this huge dopamine reaction so i had to flip a switch and say i'm gonna now start deconstructing this stuff and figuring out why it's good why it works and now dude i love watching movies more than i've ever loved it in my life because before it was passive and now it's it's very proactive it's it feels far more creative and it feels like i'm i'm getting stronger which is my obsession yeah so two things on that one is i think you've just laid out beautifully robert eisenberger's theory of learned industriousness which is the idea that if if you look at kids who grow up to be extremely gritty and hardworking one of the things that that happens to them very early on is they get praised for effort over and over again or rewarded for effort over and over again and then the feeling of hard work itself takes on secondary reward properties and so i was like oh this hurts but it also feels good and i want to keep doing it because i've gotten rewarded for it in the past and it sounds like you've you've taken constructive criticism as one of those reward keys that that really motivates you to to keep getting better the other thing that i thought was really interesting about what you just said is um i thought you were you were actually going to go in a cognitive entrenchment direction on this uh when you said you didn't watch movies for a long period it reminded me of a simpsons writer that i that i interviewed once george meyer who when he was writing for the simpsons he refused to watch seinfeld because he was afraid that he'd fall into this klept amnesia trap and accidentally misremember one of their jokes as his and he just he didn't want to take that risk and i always feel like this is a tightrope walk because when you're you're trying to innovate in an industry you can't be completely clueless about what everybody else is doing otherwise you might miss something really important and yes blockbuster sears blackberry i'm talking to you kodak but uh on the other hand if you're too obsessed with what your competitors are up to then you you get entrenched and it's harder to see with fresh eyes do you have thoughts on how to stay on that tightrope and not fall off either side yeah so i would say this is where self-awareness is going to be really really important i think there are people that um they they maybe exist better in a vacuum or they have such strong intuition about something and i i believe exclusively in informed tuition i don't think you're born with intuition i think that it's developed just through your activities and you give a great example on this uh with steve jobs and how he had informed intuition around technology but not around transportation and so what he does in apple is is life altering and his investment in segway was a waste so that i think is very very real but i think that like anything it's a spectrum and so there are some people maybe that intuition is developed more intensely or it's developed more quickly invisibly whatever the case may be and then there are people who i'll call synthesizers so and that's me and if you put me on a desert island what i would come up with would probably not be very interesting but if you put me in an information rich environment i will make connections that are unlike the connections anybody else will make and i have cultivated a fearlessness over making unique connections and so i had to embrace that i am a synthesizer and that for me to take in all this data to read broadly like people that i think that confirm what i believe and people that violently oppose what i believe and all of that ends up coming together in a unique way in my own mind and so for a long time i was paralyzed because i felt like i'm never going to think a unique thought and that was really discouraging to me and if you've seen a beautiful mind that was at least as portrayed in the movie is what he struggled with was you know i'm never going to have an original thought and it plagues him and ends up being a driver for him and he ends up obviously having a very original thought and ends up really changing our understanding of economics but for me what i found was i'm a process thinker so i need to i'm not i don't sit in a vacuum and have these amazing breakthroughs i suffer and then have a breakthrough based on things that i've read that finally collide and i put them in a new context with a collision that maybe other people would make filter through a value system that other people don't have and now i know how to move through in the world because i'm trying to satisfy my own emotional needs and i'm a total slave to the physics of the world so what actually moves me towards my goals so you you put all that together and i'm sort of unabashed uh about like i need to take in all this data i'm not worried about klepto amnesia i'm happy to celebrate and champion other people i i don't have those fears because i didn't need it to be my idea in the first place so even when i think about writing like i when when he's a writer and he wants to say something original he wants it to be his own jokes i understand all of that for sure my thing as a writer is i'm i'm gonna tell like if i were to try to do seinfeld like literally i'm gonna make seinfeld i'm gonna do this just seinfeld i'm gonna try to copy seinfeld as hard as i can as long as i trust my own intuition and i divert when i feel something is even funnier i'm trying to make it better it will just end up being so different that that gives me sort of that armor around not really worried about this and i would never intentionally go down that path of trying to mimic it so then once you put in i'm really trying to take this somewhere new and i'm trusting my own unique quirks and i'm fearless about chasing them you get something that's original do you always trust your intuition though because when you were describing your hypothesis testing approach before it sounds like to me you're not following your gut you're testing it so i it's funny i wouldn't if i just gave the impression that i trust my instincts the answer is no so what i'm saying is when i'm writing something and i have something that bends me in a weird direction i'm going to follow that but the only thing i care about is how do people actually respond so what i used to tell my students is because i used to teach filmmaking i said you have you have a choice before you you you can be here to masturbate or you can be here to make love and if you want to masturbate go make some weird art house film that nobody understands that's absolutely fine like you're trying to please yourself respect but if you're here to make love you have to think about your partner and your partner is the audience and you have to understand how the things you do impact them and so your obsession has to be not what you intend to communicate but what is actually understood and so if you don't understand that now you're in real trouble so i'm not trying to exist in a vacuum i'm i'm trying to say my hypothesis is that my unique way of interpreting this will actually have a bigger response than the other thing and i'm fearless enough to try it now if i get feedback that it didn't work then i'm going to adjust a hundred percent i'm just never afraid if i really feel that something is the right way i'm gonna do it and if i'm unsure i'll admit that i'm unsure and i'll try to get feedback from people to try to orient myself that's such a helpful edit because as a social scientist when when people say you know trust your intuition or follow your gut i generally don't trust things that i don't know where they came from and i want to know why why you're so confident in your intuition well let's actually talk about what intuition is it's just subconscious pattern recognition right you've you've detected some kind of connection that you're not fully able to articulate and don't you want to find out what that is right make the the pattern conscious so then you can test whether the pattern that you're seeing now is actually relevant to the choice that you're about to make um you know steve jobs with the segway example is such a fun one for me because he spent all those years in you know in the software worlds building up his intuition so that he could very quickly know whether design made sense or not he didn't have the subconscious pattern recognition calibrated for transportation and so you know he quickly got bowled over just by how brilliant the technology was and seemed to miss some of the user applications of it and how difficult it would be to write a segue down sidewalks and i think a lot of people do this right they build up their intuition in one domain and then they just fight they follow it blindly in another domain not realizing that the patterns that held in one world don't apply to the next one yeah no question dude i have thoroughly thoroughly thoroughly enjoyed this conversation i thoroughly enjoyed your works they are incredible i highly encourage people to get after it um and man in this time where i think that uh new leaders coming to the surface is going to be so critical for us navigating our way to a positive beautiful end i'm eternally grateful for everything that you write on the subject and helping people develop self-awareness and the skills um that they need to lead well amongst all the other amazing topics that you've covered so dude thank you for the way that you walk through the world where can people find out more about you well first of all tom thank you i've i've heard many many rave reviews of your passion for self-improvement and i i think i underestimated just how curious you were even even having heard that from awesome mutual friends so it's it's really cool to see it in action and soak it up a little bit um on your question i would say i guess adamgrant.net is the place to start i host a ted podcast called work life where i try to figure out how we can make work suck a little bit less and i do a monthly newsletter called granted where i cover some of my favorite new insights about work in psychology and would love to see people in either of those places or hear them or have them hear me if they're interested i love it man all right everybody if you haven't already dive into this world you will be richly rewarded and speaking of rich rewards if you haven't already subscribed be sure to do so and until next time my friends be legendary take care the great irony is the way you build great companies is with an infinite mindset the way you build great companies is by prioritizing people before profit the way you build great companies is will before resources both things important but there has to be this general leaning

Channel: Tom Bilyeu

Views: 78,917

Rating: 4.8793197 out of 5

Keywords: Tom Bilyeu, Impact Theory, ImpactTheory, TomBilyeu, Inside Quest, InsideQuest, Tom Bilyou, Theory Impact, motivation, inspiration, talk show, interview, motivational speech, Adam Grant, IT, leadership, management, giver, taker, integrity, values, adapt, cognitive entrenchment, growth mindset, championships, Phil Jackson, Michael Jordan, personal growth, intuition, leader, self-awareness, humility, shepherd

Id: 31vFw4pipTA

Length: 45min 5sec (2705 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 16 2020