Adam Grant Returns Again

Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert, Experts. on Expert, I'm Dan Shepard, I'm joined by Mrs. Mouse. Hi. You really need a tweet, tweet sound.

You want me to have a mouse sound? Yeah, like a squeak, squeak.

You know, when you hear your name.

It just reminds me of like singing or something.

And characters.

Yeah, and characters, and I don't like that. My lip is like falling off.

Why?

I don't know, I just like, it's like shedding.

As we sit here? Yeah. Was it doing it earlier today?

Yeah.

Okay, so it's not a result of talking to me on the microphone. No. Okay, so I'm completely clean on this. You didn't cause this. I have nothing to feel bad about, okay.

No, I just, it's weird.

I can only go into comforting mode once I know I'm not to blame. Yes, because I would have to mount a defense if I was to blame, but now that I'm not to blame, I can comfort. I'm so sorry your lip's falling off. Thank you. Yeah.

It doesn't hurt, it just feels weird.

Did you have it on something hot last night?

Mm, nope. Mm.

Okay, today's guest returning for the third or fourth time?

Third time.

Third time. Third time.

Third time is the charm.

A friend, a very good friend, Adam Grant. Adam Grant is an organizational psychologist, a professor at Wharton, and a bestselling author. His books include Think Again, Originals, Give and Take, Option B. He has the wonderful podcast I've been a guest on, Rethinking Work Life. And now, most importantly, buckle up for this, a new book out right now called Hidden Potential, The Science of Achieving Greater Things.

You know, I was thinking when I was editing this, I was imagining being in his class.

Oh, uh-huh.

And I would have wanted his approval so bad.

It must be, he's so energetic. It must be the best. Well, he gets voted best teacher all the time. Yeah, yeah.

And I would wanna be his best student.

Right. I don't have that urge, trustingly.

Yeah, because you have the opposite, because you don't like authority, but I do.

You love it, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, I just want their admiration.

Yeah, you're horny for authority. That's what we know pretty well about you. Please enjoy our good friend, Adam Grant.

He's an armchair experimenter.

He's an armchair experimenter.

He's an armchair experimenter.

Hello.

Good, how are you? Did Kristen give this to you, or do you want it?

It's much to me.

What's that?

I don't know what you're talking about.

I don't know what you're talking about.

I don't know what you're talking about. My best shirt ever made.

For the listener, Adam is wearing a Dax Shepard shirt.

Did Kristen just give that to you, or did you come? You have it. I ordered it months ago, are you kidding?

Oh my God, that's a second.

Let me see what we've got here. Have you seen this one? That one's chips. Oh, I think that's Crosby. I think that's from Parenthood.

This is the back up.

This is probably my low point on my body journey that they decided to pay. This is god bod. Yes, it was.

When I saw this post of Kristen's, I texted her saying, I need one, and she sent two.

So it did come from.

Have you been wearing it around town?

No, I didn't want to damage it. You should have.

Aren't you just coming from Huberman? That would have been great. if you were wearing that on Huberman, just to fuck with him a little bit. That would have been hilarious. I didn't even think of it.

Everyone's egos.

Oh my God, three shirts.

No, it's only two.

Oh, okay. Well, now, all in, you had three.

That's true.

What a physique, though. Can we just celebrate Adam's physique for a second? First of all, the vascularity is gorgeous. And then I just saw arrows. Do you see the arrows?

I was.

I'm free to just totally, whatever we call that.

Just trying to make me uncomfortable. No, no, no. Thank you.

Objectify. Objectify. There's ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. But I think, dude on dude, objectification's fine, right? Is that okay?

Do you consent to being objectified by Dax?

I guess that's a better question.

Oh, okay. Well. I take it all back. How's your day going?

So far, so good. I'm excited to hang out with you guys.

This is number two of the day or worse?

No, only two.

When you record your own podcast, do you do more than one ever in a sitting?

Yeah, but mine are much shorter than yours.

I know, as I've been a guest and I was like, why are you wrapping this up so quick? I took it as kind of like. a personal, like this must not be going well. He's like really landing the plane like a half hour in. How long are they?

Usually half an hour.

In that timeframe. for you, that feels right? Or do you not feel like, oh shit, we're just getting into the meat of it?

I think that if it goes longer, my audience will be bored.

Interesting. Have you ever experimented? That's just a hunch you have.

We've tested it. I think whenever I go more than 30 to 40, we start to see drop off. I think a lot of people listen on their commute for me. Whereas you're their friends.

Well, hold on a second. They listen in their commute. Often they get half the episode on the way there to work. And then, when they get in their car, then they're excited to hear the conclusion. Added, excited, but I have heard that they break it up.

And then on their workout and then, when they do, dishes and then, cause it's like a three hour endeavor.

It'll take you through most of your day. And now five times a week. So when you do do back to backs, do you feel any decline or are you energized by it?

Maybe both. Okay, yeah. The decline is energizing.

Decline is energizing.

I was so much better two hours ago. No, I feel like round two is always the best. Oh, it is. Yeah, I learned this in teaching. Intensive teaching is three different sections, and section two always gets the best of me.

This is virtually the same arc for me acting.

So you only do two takes.

Here's what happens. The first one, I'm like, ooh, I gotta fix X, Y, and Z, right? I always make a bunch of mistakes. first take. Second, take's probably the best.

Yeah, it doesn't feel fresh anymore.

How long of a tour are you on for this book? Is this one of many stops?

We're on the early end. I don't know. I haven't looked at the schedule for the next month.

But I have to imagine this is a real departure from your normal schedule when you go out and promote stuff on the road.

Yes, I generally don't leave my house. What's the change?

And do you like it? Like, oh, I get to go out and explore the world and sit down with other people?

I think I like it. There's a part of me, wait, I wrote the book. Just read the book. I don't need to talk about the thing that I wrote. There's a part of me that loves the ideas and can't wait to share them.

And I might mess it up,

but I don't think you can mess it up.

How about just being on the road with no family members? Kind of a nice?

No, sad.

Immediately, you don't get two days.

No, I miss them.

Immediately. Right away.

Do you have any vices?

I have many vices.

All right, now. we're getting, now.

Let's get into some vices.

No, now I'm mad.

Oh, you've made Dax mad.

Yeah, this is just now taking a turn.

Oh, okay.

Okay. Let me just, as an example.

You know, I showed up here thinking, how do I piss off Dax?

Well, you've done it.

I'll wear his shirt and then I'll say I love my kid.

Listen, when I leave town for, let's say it's a week, first three days, I'm like, oh, right. Hey, Dax Shepherds here. Nice to meet you. I'm reminded of what I get to do when I just follow whatever urge I have. Go eat over here.

Forever, like she could then leave her life.

She has said on certain movies, she's like, yeah, I just could stay there forever. And you're claiming to have neither of those windows?

I don't feel either of those things. I think there's a fun age factor here. My idea of peak fun is I'm an eight or nine-year-old. Okay. So I'm playing video games, I'm playing sports, playing board games, and our kids do all that.

I see.

You get into a hotel room and it's time to jerk off in a way that you just don't get to do at home. Like you get to eventize it.

Every once in a while, I'm listening to Armchair and I'm like, they left that in?

Oh, really? That's a compliment. And you're horrified? This is in your episodes or in-.

No, just in general. There are moments when I'm picturing Monica cringing.

Of me?

Maybe you. Not the cast, right? It's usually you. Yeah.

Have you ever heard a guest? have a cringy moment?

Not that I can think of, no. Right.

And so she's very kind to the cast.

I'm very kind to you and me too.

You are kind and respectful, because I stand by the thing that probably you would want cut out. Exactly. Yeah, I stand by it.

Yes, I know part of the dynamic is also the authenticity of him, and I have to remain.

The arc for me is usually, one, I can't believe you had that thought, Dax, and two, you said it out loud, and three, it's in the episode. And then delayed reaction is, and this is part of how he normalizes vulnerability.

Yeah, I like that.

So can you think of a specific example where you're like, jeez Louise. Like if I tell a shitty my pants story, that kind of thing, or?

That's in the ballpark.

Okay.

Oh, yeah. That's pretty embarrassing. Gross.

Or I had a mix up in an orgy once. Yeah, I didn't hear that one. That probably shocked you.

Yeah, and I brought it up randomly and this was funny because he's talked about it many times and then I said it once on a fact check. Well, like, yeah, like when you pooped in the bed, in an orgy, and he got so upset, like embarrassed and defensive. And I was like, you talk about this all the time. But when I said it, it was not okay.

You have to control your authenticity.

Well, I would argue it's. No. This is pretty common, I think. The interview people who've written a book and the book is incredibly vulnerable, but it's a little different talking about it out loud. And then I'm steering this conversation through their trauma.

It's like what you were saying about your book. You already figured out how to lay it out. So then, to talk about it again is like, just look at the other thing. I already figured that out.

That's a good question. Do you have with your book what directors have with a movie, which is, they've edited the movie like for four months and seen a thousand, and they just don't want to ever see it again. Do you get that way with a book or no?

A little bit. I definitely get tired of editing it at some point because the creative juices are no longer flowing. I get to a point where, okay, there are little things I might improve and I don't know that the average reader is going to care. Should I just move on or should I keep tinkering? And I think the bar for that has gone up over time, which is a constant battle between perfectionism and prioritization.

Well, right, because don't you think the trap is at some point you have to go, it's not going to appeal to everyone. It's going to appeal to this band of people, and it's already there at that point.

It's hard to know, right?

It's like you keep trying to make it better for other people, but then maybe you lose other people in route to that.

I might. And there's a part of me that's still grappling with the idea that it's possible, or hoping that it's possible, to create something that is for everyone. That doesn't exist.

That's the people pleaser-y, don't you think? Yeah, that is.

That does not exist. No.

How much of these books do you think you're writing to yourself?

33%.

Just 33%.

I don't know, I made up a number. Partially. There's always at least a chapter where I'm writing the message that I need to hear. Right. And if I explain this thoroughly enough and I think about it hard enough and I have to talk about it over and over again, then maybe I'll internalize it.

Do you think you also could write in an attempt to bolster or an already existing argument and really not teach yourself something? I guess it could go either way.

Yeah, I think that would be kind of a waste of time, though. That's an article, it's not a book.

Well, what's really fun about your book is it's virtually the opposite of the book I just contacted you about to tell you I was very nervous to have a guest on because the guest is so much smarter than I am, and I disagree with that guest. So that's Robert Sapolsky, that'll probably have come out. And his is about determinism and the lack of self-will. And I would argue in many ways, hidden potential is the absolute opposite of that.

I like that argument. Tell me more.

Well, what's funny is now to me, this is on another end of the spectrum. You're debunking a lot of myths in this. One would be innate talent, right? This notion that people are born gifted athletes or gifted mathematicians or whatever, and you fundamentally disagree with that. Do you disagree with it or do you just have examples of exceptions to it?

I think I disagree with it. Nobody's born to be Mozart. Even Mozart wasn't born Mozart. And probably a better example would be Bach. But you see this across domains.

Right. And that feels like something we have control over motivation. But then, of course, the Sapolsky argument would be like, no, you pretty much, you have a baseline of motivation or maybe some spectrum of motivation. But doesn't that sound disheartening?

Yeah, it also just sounds wrong.

It does.

It doesn't track with my understanding, as an organizational psychologist, of how motivation works. He's certainly older than I am, but I've been studying motivation for a quarter century now. And I don't think that motivation is fixed. Maybe the biological reserves are hard to control, but the psychological energy of what am I excited about? What do I want to spend my time on?

I mean, I think I do, but how would I know, I guess?

Well, he might say that those choices technically exist, but it depends on the environment you're in. Like. if you have parents or something who can't give you the time or energy, then maybe you have less choice, because you have to do X, Y, and Z instead of putting your effort into playing the piano or whatever.

Your context, how you were nurtured, your biology, all these things add up. I can concede to all that. I feel like it gives you a range.

That's exactly how I think about it. And that's why we can't have motivation alone in a vacuum. We also need opportunity. That's why we need coaches and mentors, and teachers who give us the scaffolding to climb to heights we can't reach on our own. But it's not like.

Yeah. Well, right out of the gates in the book, I'm like nodding along. Everything's going good. I love how you write. I love your point of view.

Not just speak. A polyglot can think in multiple languages too.

What?

I said polygoth. Glot. Glot. Yeah, polyglot. Thanks for correcting me.

No worries.

I wrote down it wrong in my notes. I've written goths. I guess it should be someone's multiple gothic.

Disciplines.

Four black coats.

Yeah, they know satanism. They know it. They got it all.

So a true polyglot not only speaks multiple languages fluently, but actually thinks in multiple languages. So they've internalized it that much.

Oh, jealous. And so the examples you give in the book are people who actually were not good at it to begin with. And here's where I got very upset. Because I'm like, no, Adam, I can't fucking learn it. Whether it's the dyslexia or who knows what else is going on.

I agree with Dax on this.

Prove us wrong, Adam.

I could never be that. There's part of my brain that's deficient in that way.

First of all, I don't think that everyone has the skill or the motivation to become a polyglot. So let's be clear. Okay. I agree with the range theory. Just like anybody who says talent doesn't matter.

Which is what?

Which is they learn by reading and by listening. Empirically, you learn it much faster if you use it. And very few classes force you to do what kids do when they're learning a new language, which is just start babbling. Yeah. And start using it until it becomes second nature.

And it's for a grade. Inherently, that's sort of an issue, right? Where I'm just trying to figure out how to say the sentence in order to get the A. To pass the thing. I'm not really trying to learn it.

Yeah, you don't have like big fantasies of living in Spain.

Yeah. No. I mean, I do now, but I didn't then.

You were probably graded mostly on your written work, too.

Oh, for sure, because I could control it.

Yes. Yeah. I'm so amazed that learning styles are still a thing in schools. Our kids were told, some kids are verbal learners and others are visual learners and others are kinesthetic learners. And you got to figure out, are you the person who learns best by listening, by reading, by seeing, or by doing?

Well, but then what are we saying? Certainly, everyone doesn't learn the same.

No, but when it comes to the medium, a lot of people listen to podcasts. I hear this frequently. You must hear this all the time. I don't like reading. I listen.

Well, that was going to be one of my complaints about your book. I'm sitting there fucking listening to your book and then you come on and say that you learn far less and retain less if you listen to the book. You're shaming anyone that's currently listening,

which included me. Oh, no. And everyone listening to this. Yeah.

I'm not shaming you, Jax. I'm just giving you a hard time. No, I mean, I think there are reasons to listen. It might be more entertaining. It might be easier to process.

Right, right. I love the audio medium. And ideally, buy it in hard copy, then also get it on tape.

That is what publishers recommend, but I'll leave it to you.

That's just the recommendation.

But I think the message is to say, you have to be willing to embrace the discomfort of stepping out of your preferred learning style, because sometimes the mode that's hardest for you is the one where you actually process the most deeply.

Can you give me a hard example of that? Contrast it to two. So, like, I think of myself as an auditory learner, right? And I think I have a really high retention for what I hear. I can think of probably a thousand Howard Stern interviews where it's like, I know almost the whole interview, which is wild.

So I think the risk of just listening is that it's too easy to nod and agree with the person who's talking, because you can be seduced by the charisma of their voice. You can get into the flow or the rhythm of the argument they're making. When you're reading, you're much more likely to think things through with your own voice. So you may pause and say, wait a minute, what do you mean? And then you go back and reread the sentence, which almost never happens when you're listening.

But that's a great point, because I guess, yes, I'm liable to hear you say something, but if I make it come out of my own voice, I might go like, actually, that doesn't sound right to me if I were saying that.

I don't believe that.

Right.

Also, you're in it in a different way when you're reading it, as opposed to just passively hearing it. You're in the story when you're reading.

Yes. Sometimes audio is like you're watching a movie. When you're reading, it's more like you're directing the movie.

Right. So what are teachers to do? I mean, it feels like it was all year one and voted best teacher at Wharton seven times in a row. I would think you would know. What are they to do with that?

I think the goal is to try to tailor the learning method to the topic and say, if I'm trying to create engagement, let's go audio. And then, when I want critical thinking, let's bring in a visual component or a verbal component. And so I think we should still be mixing the different learning modalities, but we shouldn't be limiting kids to the thing they're already comfortable with and feel like they're good at.

Right. Well, you write a bunch in the book about perfectionism, and I think a lot of people will relate to it. Would you call yourself a perfectionist? Maybe when you're younger more?

I am in certain regards, but not across the board. Like in cheerleading, for sure. Here, I think editing and stuff, hyper-detailed, but not in things I don't care about.

This, I imagine, is a bit of a chapter to yourself. This would be one of them?

Yeah, this was the one that I need to reread over and over again. So thank you for making me talk about it.

Yeah, good. At what age did you start seeing this as a pathology? Because perfectionism takes you quite far for a while, right? It really works, like all drugs. They work for a long time, then they stop working.

14, 15, when I started getting serious about diving. I thought it was an asset. I started diving too late. I was a teenager, and a lot of my competitors were five when they started. My nickname was Frankenstein.

Oh, wow.

And it sounds even cooler.

I don't know what rip is.

The rip entry, it's when you hit the water and it sounds like there's a tearing noise. And then you can hear it. You've never noticed Olympic?

Yeah, you know it. I mean, there's just the tiniest splash.

Well, I know about a tiny splash, but that's a visual thing. We're talking about an auditory. So you're saying there's an accompanying sound.

So you have your flat palm on the water, you hit the water, you hear the sound, and then the water just gets stuck down and the person disappears. Oh, I love it. I thought that looked like a magic trick, the way that divers would disappear. And also it's the most important determinant of your score. And so I thought, I can't jump high.

well, all you can do is rip.

And Eric said so, because that is the thing that ultimately determines the quality of the dive is how you go in the water. So I thought this was going great for me, but it wasn't because perfectionism was stopping me from learning new dives and raising my degree of difficulty and becoming more competitive. And challenging yourself. Yeah, because I was just trying to master the easiest dives. And then I would walk down the diving board and if my takeoff wasn't perfect, I would stop, balk, fall in and start over.

Yeah, I was going to say, you were bailing out of most of the dives you were attempting, right?

Which really stifled my learning.

Because you didn't want to look bad at it.

Yeah, and I felt like, if it's not going to be the perfect takeoff, why go? It's already a waste.

True, I can relate to that. But the examples you give of people who didn't show incredible aptitude as kids. Do you think the mechanism for that is when they're great early, they get tons of praise, and now that's what they're actually chasing, as opposed to originally chasing the skill?

Fascinating. So you think that if they excel too early, they start to get obsessed with approval? Yes. Instead of progress?

Potentially. Let's just turn it on the reverse. Why wouldn't someone who was great at something right out of the gates not then also make the same incremental leaps forward and then just become indomitable? What happens? And I wonder if it's just they're known for being good at it and that ends up being handcuffs.

I think that's part of what happens. There are a lot of child prodigies who don't become adult geniuses in their craft. Some of that is probably driven by staying in their comfort zone, which gets narrower and narrower. And so they don't take on new challenges. They hear play to your strengths.

What's the price you've paid for perfectionism? What is the toll it takes on you? If you think of it as like an addiction or any other kind of pathology.

Burnout, misery, depression, despair, rumination in small doses. I changed it enough fast that it didn't take a lasting toll. But I remember going to diving practice and Eric had to kick me out of the pool every day at the end of practice because I would always say one more. And I thought that was me showing grit and being motivated. But it was also me not being satisfied that I'd been good enough.

But then what broke through? What made you change?

So Eric Best, my coach, said one day, listen, there's no such thing as a perfect 10.. I'm sure you've heard Olympic announcers say, perfect 10s, it's a misnomer. In the rule book, a 10 is for excellence, not for perfection. There is no such thing as a perfect dive.

Oh, interesting.

Which I didn't know either. So even a dive that gets straight 10s, you can find a whole bunch of things wrong with it. It's just excellent.

How come more people aren't achieving it? then? It's hard. It feels like it's even more complicated than that, that it's actually just relative to everyone else. that's diving.

I think that's true.

I didn't watch diving as religiously as I watched snowboarding. But it was almost like, if Shaun White was going seventh, they couldn't give anyone above a nine something because they knew Shaun was gonna be better. They had to leave some gap so that he could go above that. I think that's in their minds, isn't it, as judges?

That happens a lot. Actually, I think there's evidence on figure skating that it's bad to go first. Oh, I guess. Because the judges are too critical. at first.

Yeah, I bet it's like they set that first score, and then if everyone is now below them, then they're trying to go like, well, I guess eight two is now a 10.. We gotta work backwards from that.

Yeah, it's really tricky as a competitor because you feel like you should be scored objectively, but the standard is changing. I think the aha for me in that moment was to say, okay, if excellence is the goal, then I can't compare my dive to a standard of perfection. All I can do is ask, am I better today than I was yesterday? And that made a huge difference. And then, I didn't write about this, but there was a really pivotal moment where I was afraid to try a new dive.

Yeah.

It's extremely unsettling. Yeah. So what do I do? I stand there. I'm just frozen on the end of the board, and I'm shaking.

But the thing itself gives you the confidence. Exactly. The order wrong.

Yeah, you have to take the leap in order to earn the confidence. I think that was a life-changing reflection from him, because I've heard this in everything I was afraid to do in my head. I remember hesitating to get on the TED stage for the first time. And hearing Eric's voice, are you gonna give a TED Talk one day? I would love to.

I like that.

People that are perfectionists, I bet they tell themselves a story which is to achieve, this is worth it, no pain, no gain. But there is data that would suggest that they're not better. If they're doing a multiple choice, great. But if they get out in the real world, they're not better at solving new tasks.

It's a great synthesis of the data. Perfectionists do better in school because school is predictable. You know what you have to master. You can work toward that. Then, in life, all of a sudden, you don't know exactly what you're being graded on.

One of my best friends is an insane perfectionist. And I feel like the perfectionism eclipses intuition often, or real life skill, because we're cooking together. And this was in high school, perfect student. And we were going through the recipe. We were frying something and it said two inches of oil.

And I was like, yeah, diameter.

And I was like, no, it's two inches deep. And she could not believe me and had to ask someone else. She was like, but it says two inches. She could not. So literal.

Had she ever poured oil onto a surface, it never stops expanding. It just disappears at some point. Yeah, you wouldn't even know what you were measuring.

It just made me laugh so hard because this person I know to be brilliant, and she is, this so obviously was wrong and she couldn't see it.

I have been, I think, liberated by this. And I do know how in practice, yeah, I'm game to try shit, because my assumptions, I'm never gonna be, you know, it's not really my defining characteristic. I'm like leaning way more on that. dude will try anything.

I'm curious to hear your reaction to this, but I was thinking about the character skills in the book on my way over here. And I was thinking this podcast embodies all of them. The two of you are constantly seeking out discomfort. Well, that's true. Sometimes even imposing it.

Thank you. Thank you, yeah. What's the difference between flooding and submersion therapy? I had not heard flooding until I was reading your book.

I don't know. What's submersion therapy?

Well, and this could be the ninth thing I've written down, because I'm hearing you say it and then I'm typing on an airplane. But submersion therapy isn't like. you're afraid of germs, so they put you in a- Immersion.

Oh, thank you. I feel much better now. Like I've never heard of that before.

Similar sound.

It could also be called submerging. Yeah, sure. Or it's gonna submerge you in this thing you're afraid of.

Yeah.

Okay, so as I understand it, the broader category is normally called exposure therapy. Exposure therapy. And the idea is to get you familiar with the thing you're afraid of or uncomfortable with. And so there are two extremes of how that can be done. One is flooding or immersion.

Tons.

Oh, my God, so many.

What are you afraid of?

Being embarrassed.

Yeah, being embarrassed.

By what, though?

Physical, blunder. Anything, really. If she walks into like a glass window, which she's done before.

Yeah, I did it once. Once.

That can't have been the only time, right? I've done it a handful of times in my days.

Yeah, I was so embarrassed. I wonder if I'd still, part of it. was the circumstance, like the people around, and I wanted to seem-.

Athletic.

Yeah, agile.

A seen person.

That's a bad example, because you can't then go and practice your walking near glass walls.

Swimming, I'm afraid of it, because I don't think I can do it anymore.

Okay, the flooding or immersion version would be, we just throw you in the deep end.

Yeah, I'm not doing that.

Systematic desensitization would be, we're gonna have you kind of dip your toe in the shallow end. And then you're gonna maybe lay down within a foot of water, but you know you can float and it's not too deep. And then over time, you build your comfort.

Okay, I like that better.

There are big individual differences based on personality and based on how extreme your fear is, on which is better.

So yeah, one's not definitively better than the other, it's just what suits your-.

Yes, if I had to guess, I think that when it comes to stretching ourselves out of our comfort zones, many of us default to systematic desensitization when we could benefit more from flooding.

Right, I'll give you a great example. We're into cold plunging, and you won't systematically get in. You're not gonna dip your foot and then next week, your ankle and then your leg. You gotta commit.

Yes, and I think this applies far beyond these kinds of physical challenges. When I think about hidden potential, I think about people not realizing they can improve at improving. And one of the best ways to do that is to take the leap, as we were talking about. So I'm thinking about when I was afraid of public speaking. I remember in college, I would physically shake, thinking about raising my hand.

Oh, just sitting in class.

Sitting in class as a student. The idea of participating.

You're such a wonderful contradiction because you have such a performer in you, and yet you also had this hefty sense of fear surrounding it.

Apparently.

Well, audience participation is awful. I hate it too.

Well, that's different. You don't like when they force you to do something, but when you're in class and you're like, no, hold on, you don't have any pro. No?

Not when I was in school, no. Now, I have more.

We've evolved. We both sit there saying nothing.

Yeah, but thinking so many things.

Yes, taking lots of notes.

Boy, we are on opposite ends of that spectrum, the three of us. I know just enough to have an opinion about this. I haven't seen the movie, but I saw the trailer. I'll tell you why it's wrong.

You remind me, Dax, of a student I had years ago whose classmates wrote that he physically lacked the ability to raise his arm, but that did not affect his capacity to speak.

Indefinitely. Yeah, exactly.

It will shut off at some point. And so then the next step from there was. I got invited to teach a class for Air Force colonels and generals. And I thought, this is the challenge. I'm in my mid-20s, fresh out of a PhD program.

Yeah, yeah.

They've got thousands of flying hours. They're managing multi-billion dollar budgets. I need to put myself in front of that room and see if I can handle it. It was brutal. I remember reading the audience feedback.

Oh, okay.

But technically he was right. The worst one was, I think this was a colonel, because some of them signed their names, said, and I quote, I gained nothing from this session, but I trust the instructor gained useful insight.

Oh God, yikes.

Now I'm gonna be guessing, but was the result of which, yeah, that went terribly. I just lived out my worst fear and I'm still alive. And three days later I can weather that. Is that what happens? Half.

So the, it could have been worse. This is not the end of the world, happened. But then, uh-oh, I have to give another one of these. And I have no idea how I'm gonna do it. And I don't wanna let them down.

Well, your fear was. I don't belong here, do we?

So I have to prove myself.

Yes, and then you expose yourself as not belonging there.

Yes, exactly.

What I should have done is shown them that I was willing to improve myself. And so in round two, I only had about a week between sessions. I couldn't re-imagine all the content. All I could do was change the way that I connected with them. So I walked in, I looked around the room, and I said, I know what you're all thinking right now.

Uh-huh, nice, nice.

They did not react that way. Ice, cold, stare. No, no giggle. Nobody moved, nobody made a sound. It felt like an eternity.

Okay, and they all laughed.

Thank God for that guy.

You just picked the wrong age. Yeah, yeah. It's like Seinfeld. tell you, these little words that make a huge difference. 13 hysterical, 12 what?

I needed those notes a while ago, but it really changed our relationship. And I think what it did was, I called out the elephant in the room and I let them know that, look, I'm aware you all have a lot more experience than I do. Hopefully we can create a good learning experience together. And the feedback was much better after that. And it was a great reminder that, consistently, my biggest moments of learning have happened when I put myself in extremely uncomfortable situations.

How'd you prepare for your first TED Talk? Did you do it in front of your wife and kids or anything?

I did it in front of a lot of audiences.

You did? Yes. Like you were a standup?

Yeah, I gathered a group of friends and colleagues and former students who told me I needed to throw the whole thing out and start over from scratch. Oh, wow. That was fun. At one point, Joanna, our oldest, actually was doing impressions of me giving a TED Talk and making fun of all my goofy mannerisms, which was hilarious and also really helpful.

All the nervous tics. Yes, everything.

And I actually went back and watched it while I was writing the discomfort-seeking chapter. And it's excruciating, but I can see all these mistakes I made. They don't bother me as much as they used to, because I look at them now and say, that was the best I could have done at that time.

And that was the path that led me to a place I'm pretty happy with.

Exactly. I needed to take that leap.

You have this bizarre capacity, almost maybe masochism, where you claim at least to love feedback. And you've written a book about it. I do love feedback.

Youthful feedback.

Yes, but I will say you distinguish exactly what you're looking for in this book, which I appreciate it, which is, if you ask for feedback, you're liable not to get anything quite useful. But if you ask for advice, I thought this was a neat distinguishing aspect of the request.

One of my favorite findings.

Yeah, so how did you discover that?

Practically, I started giving a lot of talks and afterward I would ask, how did that go? And nobody said anything helpful back. Oh, it was great. Oh, I enjoyed it. What do I do with that?

And there's not consensus either. You're like, I don't know, I'm gonna throw this out. I got three opposite viewpoints. What do I choose from?

Somebody says it was great. Another person said it didn't resonate. Is one person the right audience and the other was the wrong audience? Is one person more honest and the other is just trying to kiss my ass? I don't know.

Well, you point out. what I love is that novices seek encouragement and ignore criticism. Experts search for criticism, information versus validation. And I certainly have had this experience a million times, where someone wants me to read their script and I just generally ask them, do you want me to pat you on the back after it because you've accomplished it, or do you want to know how to make it better? I'll do either, but you need to tell me upfront, because I don't want to accidentally do the wrong thing, which is a weird hack.

I made this mistake for so many years. I would have students come by office hours and ask for career advice. I'd hear them describe their plan and I thought my job was to help them see their blind spots and maybe course correct if they were missing something and then they would get really upset. 10 years in, it finally hit me, oh, some of these people are just looking for approval. So I started doing exactly what you have done for a long time, which is saying right when they walk in, why are you here?

It's almost impossible for someone to admit they are looking for approval.

I don't think it's as hard as you think. I think it depends on how you frame it. So are you worried that people are going to judge you for this decision? I can say yes to that. I mean, in a lot of cases, it's like, well, I think the high status move would be to go to this job, but I actually want to do this other thing that's much more meaningful to me.

Right.

Do you have a hard time admitting that you want someone's approval?

I don't, but I do think in general it's hard. It seems really indulgent. I think people have a hard time admitting that they're being indulgent. This just happened. It happened with Kimmel, which was like I had interviewed Letterman.

Do we think there's a difference between approval and validation, or are they the same?

It's a good question. What do you think?

For me, that's more a validation that what you're doing is good.

Yeah.

And worthy. And approval feels more like you're great.

Yeah, but full honesty, I didn't want him to say you weren't ready to interview him, or you should know. If he had been super critical, I probably would have. Because again, I was going to him like he was a father per se.

He's also your benchmark, though. He's your role model. Yes. So actually, sociologists would say your reference group is him. You've done something that I think is really important and rare, which is you don't care about pleasing everybody, but you have a few people in mind whose standards and taste you really admire.

Yeah, they're like signposts, right? They're at where I would like to be and I feel like they'd have a good sense of if I was on the right path.

You think that's a good thing to do?

I think that's a healthy thing. I don't think all social comparison is bad. I think comparing yourself to people you admire as opposed to people you envy is a great way to raise the bar. And sometimes only those people have the judgment that you're looking for to tell you whether you are on that path or not.

Yeah, well, this is where I've admitted this before, and it shames me that this is how it was, but it was like to say that I didn't get my dad's approval. That's not the truth. He gave me his approval, and this is the shameful thing, but I wanted the approval from someone I admired selfishly.

I don't think that's selfish.

Well, it's very cruel. Look, I guess if he were around every day, maybe I would have admired him more, but I just didn't. He had filed bankruptcy three times. I was very judgmental of his thing. So for him to say at a boil, it didn't feel like I had cleared some high bar that he had set.

I don't think that's a bad thing necessarily, because I think part of a parent's job is to hope that their kids will develop values of their own. And if a child develops a set of principles that's different from the ones that they think their parent lived by, then I would think that the parental approval should matter less.

Yeah. I feel guilty about it, though.

Don't you think some people would say, and I actually don't think I agree with this, but I can sense somebody would say...

You're already debugging the argument.

The comment. I can picture comments. Is it fair to value someone higher status's opinion over someone lower? Everyone's opinion should be equal.

I think it should be domain specific. I don't value a high status person's opinion across the board. I value their opinion on what they're an expert on or what they excel at.

Yeah, like. I don't need Elon Musk to tell me I'm a good husband, but if he tells me I'm a good engineer, it's going to mean a lot more.

Yeah, because he's credible. Yeah. In that domain.

You say in here that the masters weren't really perfectionist by and large, that most masters are not. And then there's this kind of pretty common pattern where they actually were poor in school. We always hear this about Einstein, right? He's like the main example of this, but it's pretty common.

It is, yeah. I mean, empirically. there are things that straight A students get wrong, which bothers them. But we talked about some of them around what perfectionists do, focusing narrowly on the things that they can really ace and losing the bigger picture. There's also a tendency to want to regurgitate the way it's always been done and say, okay, well, if I'm an A plus student, let me go and figure out what the right recipe is, as opposed to doing something original.

Yeah, well, if you're picking between a couple strategies and one has already proven results, you're obviously going to be inclined to replicate that. Bingo. And then there's no originality. And then you introduce Wobby Sobby. Am I saying that one right?

Yes. Which is not to be confused with Wobby, Wobby over there.

Yeah, I thought that's what you were going to say.

Oh, my God,

you write about Wobby Wob in your book?

And Wobby Wob's not very Wobby Sobby, to be honest. If I had to say one person was perfect, that I know, he's approaching it. Do you consider yourself a perfectionist, Wob?

Yeah, probably. He did text me for my tea order before I got here. I didn't even know there was tea.

I don't know that we had it. I think he might've went and got it for you.

Now I feel bad, but thank you.

I know we had it. How do you explain that, that these masters generally weren't good in school?

First of all, the last time I was in this attic, the first time I was on this podcast, we talked about equifinality and the idea that there are multiple paths to the same end. So there are super high achievers in school who go on to great things. The ones who don't, I think my favorite study on this was the McKinnon study of creative architects, where they tended to get Bs. in classes they weren't interested in and, As in classes, they were. The most creative architects, the Frank Lloyd Wrights of their generation, they had spikier grades than the technically skilled, but less original architects who kind of aced everything.

They're like essentialists. Yeah. Just naturally.

Or just really bad at motivating themselves.

I can't say just naturally, because that would go against the premise of the book.

You can have natural instincts. Right, okay. You can also choose to override those instincts.

So talk about wabi-sabi, not wabi-wabi.

Yeah, so wabi-sabi is a Japanese art. It's the art of honoring the beauty and imperfection, which I thought was a hell of an oxymoron. Like there's no beauty and imperfection, but the more I think about it, I wrote about Tadao Ando's architecture as a really stellar example of this, where he has these visible defects in his walls.

In the masonry, is that what it was?

I'm not knowledgeable enough about architecture to even describe it. Okay. But you can see them. You can look at these walls, which look unfinished, and you can see that his spaces are completely lacking in some basic function. Like one of his most famous houses didn't have a roof in the center, and you'd have to walk through the elements to get from the kitchen to another room.

Well, because it's so arbitrary, right? By the way, so much of what you're writing about, I can't help but go back to all of it is really the serenity. prayer. Grant me the strength to confront the things, or courage to change things. I can, the wisdom to know the difference.

Yeah, I think that's right. Maybe I would just modify the serenity prayer a little bit and say it's not just about what you can change. It's about what's worth changing.

Raw, that's a good point. Yeah, you could change anything conceivably. Would it be worthwhile or good return on investment?

Exactly. So I want to come back to approval for a second, because this is really interesting. So I was thinking about the deja vu of last time I was here. What was it? Fall of 2019??

Oh, because it was Zoom last time.

Yeah, definitely wanted your approval.

Okay, right back at you, cowboy.

Well, thank you. Even then? Oh, for sure.

It was early on for us. I'm surprised.

I mean, you had already exploded. But it wasn't just the success of the podcast, it's that I had listened and I thought you were doing something really interesting and important in the way that you both chose your guests and then the kinds of conversations you'd had with them. I listened to people I knew and learned things about them that they'd never shared with me. People I knew well, people I'd known for 20 years.

And I thought this is really powerful.

And so that mattered because you had a skill of learning from people and extracting their authenticity and vulnerability that I'd never heard before. So I wanted that. I don't care about your approval anymore. Okay. Or maybe I already have it.

Well, you clearly have it.

Maybe I already feel it.

Yeah.

But there is a part of me, if I can be perfectly candid, that wants to know that you thought my book was worth reading or listening to.

Of course.

I don't worry that you will reject my ability as a thinker or communicator, but this book is new. I poured a lot of energy into it and I want it to be interesting and useful to other people. And so I still care about that, but it's more specific approval now.

Yeah. I think that's very fair. Well, I loved your book. I love all your books. I told you not too long ago that I don't think you're the best psychologist in the world.

I didn't dislike that.

You didn't dislike that. I just said... I was actually happy to hear you say that. I think what makes you you and have the standing you have is that you're much more of a writer. You're a writer first is what I think about you.

Thank you. I'd prefer to be a thinker and a communicator as an extension of that.

Well, we were rarely best at the thing we want to be best at, aren't we?

It's true. I think that's exactly right. I realized really early on, I'm never going to win a Nobel Prize, but I am good at synthesizing Nobel Prize caliber ideas and sometimes connecting dots in ways that other people don't see.

There has also been, over time, this preference for specialists over generalists. Somehow, it's bad to be a generalist, but more and more we're seeing these people pop up. Yuval Harari being one of them, Sapolsky being one of them, you being one of them. No, generalists are really cool. They can tie in all these other elements and make it one thing that we can understand.

Nope.

Yeah, just specialists. The whole economy's fucked up, right? I think if we were economists, we would recognize that the marketplace for all these values that we are chasing, there's like half of the values that are out there. The specialists are rewarded greatly, more than the generalists, it seems.

I think that's starting to change, though, in a lot of domains. Actually, there was a great study of CEOs showing that CEOs who were multifunctional generalists, as opposed to just specializing in finance all the way up the hierarchy, actually led more innovative organizations. They had multiple languages, they could speak. They had different perspectives, they could combine. And I think there's going to be a premium moving forward, especially in an AI-driven world, on being a generalist.

It's funny you'd say AI, because I cannot stop talking about AI. It's starting to drive me crazy. I'm sure the listeners over it. But when you were talking about Wabi Sabi, I thought, well, this might be our only defining characteristic as humans. once AI does everything.

I hope so. I was thinking a lot about AI when writing the book because in some ways, hidden potential is an attempt to amplify what's uniquely human. And I think we're at an inflection point where we used to talk about how cognitive skills are what elevate us above animals. And I think character skills are really what elevate us above machines. When I think about character skills, the ability to soak up knowledge and filter it according to a set of values, a computer can't do that.

Yeah, it would have to choose its mistakes.

Yes, that would defeat all purpose.

It would have its own algorithm.

Well, it would see that the humans are loving this flawed art and then it would just choose to make flawed art. Chosen. mistake is not a mistake.

No, by definition. It's an oxymoron.

We're going to see. That's the bottom line. Everything's so theoretical right now. That's what's so. mind-blowing is, we'll know.

I don't think we're going to prefer it. I keep thinking about the Nozick pleasure box. The experience machine, as he called it. The matrix. So Nozick was a philosopher and more recently there've been experiments on this, where you ask people to imagine they could live in a simulated world where they get infinite pleasure and it's ever increasing.