Welcome to beautiful Vancouver, British Columbia. This is actually where I grew up, just across
that water. And I remember when I was a teenager here
I wanted to be a film maker. And so what did I do? Well, I found a film director with a strange
name who lived in Vancouver. I saw her on the cover of this magazine and
then I just looked up her number in the phone book, in the white pages, because that is
how you did back in the year 2000. And I gave her a call and she said she was
on the other line, but she would call me back. And, strangely enough, she did call me back. And it was amazing. I got to chat to her about film making. I guess what I really wanted was for someone
else to be able to provide me with an opportunity to get on set, to get some experience in that
industry and show me what it is like. I just want to know and it is so hard when
you are on the outside to figure out how to break in. You just want to reach out to someone who
knows and say: Help me with this. There is a psychological phenomenon known
as learned helplessness. And the experiments conducted way back decades
ago that established this phenomenon were really quite terrible. What they would do is take dogs and for some
of them, at least, they would force them to endure a punishment. For example, they would receive electric shocks
and there was nothing they could do to prevent those shocks. For other dogs there were actually little
levers or a fence they could hop over that would stop the shocks. Now later on they took all of those dogs and
they tested them again, but in environments where every one of those dogs had the opportunity
to avoid the shocks by taking some action. Now what was found was those dogs that had
been forced to endure the shocks and had no way of stopping them just kind of came to
accept the shocks even when there were actions that they could take which would stop them. So this is learned helplessness. They have learned that there is nothing they
can do to stop that uncomfortable situation. There is a related study carried out with
adults where they were trying to complete a task, except there was this distracting
noise playing. Now some of the adults had the ability to
turn off that noise, whereas others did not. It was not under their control. And when you look at the performance, the
adults who had the control to turn off the noise performed better even when they didn’t
actually exercise that control. So they just let the noise play, but the knowledge
that they could shut it off if they wanted to, made them perform better. I have worked at many jobs now, some very
menial and some more managerial or entrepreneurial like I was basically running the show. And what I found is that there is kind of
this divide between employees and managers. When you are an employee and you are assigned
to do something, you try to do it as best you have been shown, but if you hit a roadblock
you kind of stop and you go to your manager or supervisor and you say: Hey, what do I
do now? I have done that before. I have done it when I was a research assistant. I would get some result. I didn’t really know what was going on. And I would just take it to my supervisor. The supervisor would say: Oh, well, why don’t
you try this? And that suggestion that they made was always
one that I knew or, you know, I could have thought of if I had just spent five minutes
on it or if I really wanted to achieve that goal. But instead, I just had this mentality like:
I am carrying out this task and when I get stuck, I am just going to ask someone else. You know, there is a story that Tim Ferriss
tells. He is the guy who wrote The Four Hour Work
Week which is a book I would recommend. But he went and visited this university and
he challenged the students that he was talking to. He said: Look, I will give you 25,000 dollars
and a trip around the world for anyone who shows that they have made contact, by some
sort of signature or email, a letter or something, with either Jennifer Lopez, Bill Clinton—who
I think at the time was the President, possibly—and J.D. Salinger, who is the most reclusive writer
of all time. And did anyone do it? No. Not a one. Now the following year he went back to the
same university and in addition to making the challenge he told them the story from
the previous year, that no one had actually done it, no one had really tried. And that year six people actually achieved
his challenge. The point being, you need to find a way around
the learned helplessness mentality, the employee mentality and find a way to realize that things
that seem impossible can be accomplished if you really accept that you have control of
these things, that it is not outside of your control. It may be a question we should ask is: Does
our school system promote learned helplessness? Do we force kids to suffer punishments that
they really can’t change time and time and time again and then we expose them to a world
and say: Now you go out and do what you want to do? I think to a certain degree we are doing that. You know, school is for a lot of kids just
a weird and unusual kind of punishment and I guess it is no wonder that they learn that,
you know, there is things beyond their control, because school is kind of about taking control
away from kids. You know, for the dogs. How did they get the dogs to overcome their
learned helplessness and actually get away from the shocks they were receiving? They tried treats and encouragements, but
it didn’t work. They had to physically move the dogs away
from the area where they were being shocked at least twice before they would actually
learn that they had the power to change their faith, that they didn’t have to suffer that
kind of punishment again and again. But with you, I feel like just letting you
know that this thing exists might be enough to change the way you view your life and your
opportunities. Let’s talk briefly about career paths. I applied to acting school three times and
was rejected three times. I applied to film school twice and was rejected
twice. I think what I was looking for out of those
institutions was a sure fire way to get to the career that I wanted. I was basically doing the same thing that
I was doing when I asked that director in Vancouver to help me out, to get me on set. I was asking for someone else to make this
possible for me. I mean, there is a small number of jobs where
the career path is clearly laid out. You want to be a doctor, you have to go to
med school. You want to be a lawyer, you have to go to
law school. You want to be an academic, you have to do
a PhD. But I think there is a much larger group of
careers where you really have to figure out a way to do it yourself. And that is the whole point. That is the whole challenge. You feel like you are not in control and you
want someone else to help you get that control or get in the place where you need to be,
but no one can really help you. Just like that director couldn’t really
help me get where I need to be, I cannot help other people get where they need to be. You really have it all up to you. I mean, you have to demonstrate that you can
do what you want to do. You know, there is this quote. Grant me the serenity to accept the things
I cannot change and the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the
difference. Now my point is: When you are contemplating
the things that you can and cannot change, ere on the side of thinking that you can change
much more than you can, because often you will be able to. I mean, everything seems impossible until
it is done. That is a Nelson Mandela quote, which I think
is kind of appropriate in this circumstance. Things look a lot more impossible than they
are. And, really, it is up to you to find out. Hey, as you can tell, books have had a huge
impact on my life and how I see the world. And when I am traveling I like to listen to
them as audio books, because it is just more convenient on planes and trains. And there is actually one I wanted to recommend
to you. It is called Predictably Irrational by Dan
Ariely. It is about how humans don’t really behave
rationally even when we think that is what we are doing. So it provides pretty good insight into how
your brain works and how the brains of everyone around you work. And if you want, you can download this book
for free by going to Audible.com/Veritasium or you can pick any other book of your choosing
for a one month free trial. Audible is a great audio book website with
over 180,000 titles in all areas of literature including fiction, non fiction and periodicals. So you should definitely check them out. I want to thank Audible for supporting me
and I want to thank you for watching.
Ehhh... not the best of messages. Yes, learning to help yourself and figure shit out for yourself is great! But sometimes you do have to ask questions, get training in the basics, and branch out from there. I do agree with him about education bring pretty messed up, however. I most definitely did not have a good time with my K-12 education.
This looks like it isn't very related to /r/Futurology, but I think that the concept of the video is very related to some controversial concepts discussed here.
The concept of Learned Helplessness is very strong with our mortality.
We accept it as a part of life, even if it's something so bad, arguably the worst thing that could happen, and it happens to everybody.
We think we can't do anything about it, even if with our technology, there could be a cure to death by old age, and entities like SENS and Google's Calico are actively working on it, some people still say they'd prefer to die, and that it would be "unnatural" or "boring" to live longer than the norm, this to me was crazy, but "Learned Helplessness" explains it very well.
Also, the cultural obligation that some people have, that "people need to work", could be explained by it. Even if now we have automation that it's getting better and cheaper constantly, some people still cling to the obsolete idea that humans need to work to earn the right to live.
With automation of jobs, and possibly the implementation of a /r/BasicIncome, we really need to think about this stuff.
Lol I thought the title said veritaserum. First thought was the truth serum from harry potter.