We go to the dentist for a checkup once a year, and we have an annual performance review at work each year. But yet how often do we stop to do a life checkup? Have you ever done an audit where you consider if you're in the right role and if the organization you work for is still the right fit. Organizational psychologist Warton professor and best selling author Adam Grant says
we should all be scheduling life checkups. He spent years hearing from his past students who'd graduated from business school and walked into great jobs, yet they were miserably unhappy. They'd been promoted and were making lots of money, but they hated their jobs and they felt trapped. Adam's schedules a life checkup twice a year to ask himself, have I reached a learning plateau? What do I want to research?
Do I need to rethink my approach to teaching. A life checkup is just like scheduling an appointment with the doctor, even if you don't suspect anything is wrong. My name is doctor Amantha Im. I'm an organizational psychologist and the founder of behavioral science consultancy Inventium, and this is how I work a show about how to help you do your best work. So let's hear about how Adam first came up with the idea to do a life checkup and what his own process for doing them looks like.
The genesis of it is.
I kept having these students who would graduate from Wharton, and then they'd contact me a couple of years later and say, you know, I really hate my investment banking job. But I've already spent a couple of years, and I'm about to get promoted, and he'll be my third promotion, and I'm making all this money, and I think I.
Could have walked away a year or two ago, but now I can't.
And then I started getting calls from students who said, actually, I'm miserable in my job, and I should have walked away a couple of years ago, but I didn't, and now I feel trapped and I don't want to I don't want to undo the few years that I've already invested, and I feel like I would have to start over. And I had enough of these conversations that finally I said, well, why don't you put a reminder in your calendar twice a year to do a checkup, and they're like, what
is it a checkup? The same way that you go to the doctor even when it seems like nothing is wrong. Why don't you do the same thing with your career to ask yourself? Is this still the job that I want? Have I reached a learning.
Plateau or a lifestyle plateau? Is this culture toxic?
And I don't want you to do that every day because then you're just gonna be stuck in analysis paralysis and you'll never give the place a chance. But if you do it a couple of times a year, maybe it'll save you from getting trapped in.
A place that you don't want to be.
And they've reported back that it's helpful, and a lot of them still do it a decade later. So the question is do I take my own advice? What do you think?
I think you should take your own advice. It sounds very sensible, do you think so? I think?
Sorry?
And you know what it reminds me of actually, before you go into how you've taken your own advice, it reminds me of what Chip and down Heath wrote about indecisive around setting tripwires for decisions.
Yes, you know it's funny that I think the tripware principle is useful whenever I think about it as a tripwayer, I don't want to trip on a wire that sounds really unpleasant. Whereas a checkup, yeah, you know what, I need to do that in order to stay healthy. So I don't know, maybe it's just a question of framing or semantics, but I found the checkup idea appealing in a way that a trip waiter sounded a little bit dangerous.
So what did I do?
I would say, you want to know about my most recent career checkup, right, I'd love to Okay, so I think my most recent one actually can I'm I'm just going to look at my calendar here, So.
You're booking meetings with yourself in your calendar, so you remember for the life checkup.
Yeah.
I have a reminder of my calendar to pop up twice a year for a checkup. Cool and one is one is usually in It pops up in July to do a rethinking of my teaching approach and what content I'm going to cover that semester. And then I have another one that pops up in January, which is, okay, what do I want to be working on in terms of research and writing and podcasting. So I don't know if there's a recent one that's that good of a story. So can I tell you about a pivotal.
One, of course?
Okay.
So I can actually give you two if you want, and you can choose. One is the checkup that led me into podcasting, and the other is the checkup that led me to right think.
Again amazing, Tell me about both.
Okay.
So twenty seventeen, I published my third book, and I was doing a lot of speaking and a lot of interviews, and I felt like I'd become a human jukebox.
People.
They knew what songs I could play. They would tell me which one to play. I would give my performance and I would learn nothing because I was basically covering the same material as last time, and a lot of the same questions would come up from different audiences, and I felt like I was stagnating. You know, I don't think the audience saw it, because each performance felt fresh to them. But like, how many times am I going
to do the same talk? And at first I said, Okay, I'm going to do the same thing on stage that I do in the classroom, which is I'm going to throw out twenty percent of the talk each time, and that way it'll stay new. But it was still the same topic and I was still stuck to the topics that the audience was asking for, which was largely typecast based on what work I'd put out there. And then I had a checkup come up. It was I think this summer of twenty seventeen, if I remember correctly, and
I said, okay, I need to start learning again. How am I going to make that happen? And I had just launched into some conversations with the TED team about ways that we might be able to collaborate on something that's more dialogue than monologue, and we sort of stumbled into this idea of doing a podcast and I thought, oh,
this would be such a fun thing to do. I can go to the most interesting workplaces on Earth and talk to some of the most fascinating people, and my goal is to learn, and then I could share what I've learned on the back end. And that's why I host work Life, and it's probably a big part of why we're having this conversation.
Now, Wow, that's so cool, And tell me about the one that led to think again. Because I'm always so fascinated in terms of the choice for the next book, because essentially it's like committing to at least a three year plus relationship in terms of research and writing and editing and pr and hey, you know it's off the back of it.
Yeah, and there's no checkup that can rescue from it. You're stuck with it, whether you like it or not.
You know, it's funny. Actually, one of the reasons I was so excited about doing work Life and I guess the podcast enterprise more generally, was I felt like, after writing I published three books in four years, I felt a little bit constrained in the sense that I felt like I could only I can only write about or speak about topics that were bookworthy, And sometimes I just wanted to explore something that was a little smaller, interesting and important, but it wasn't necessarily one big idea that
deserved the whole book. And so podcasting was a great way to shake things up a little bit and say, all right, you know, I'm really curious about whether we could eliminate hierarchy and create organizations.
With no bosses.
And I don't have a book's worth of questions in that. I think it's you know a narrower topic, but I think it's really funny, cool. I'm going to do a podcast episode about it, and I did. I had a blast doing that for a few seasons, still having a blast doing it now. But I also started to feel an itch that I was not taking on really grand questions. That forced me to do a lot of rethinking in a big way, which is something that a book requires.
And again I had a check up come up.
I think it was January twenty eighteen, and I thought, Okay, I've been doing a lot of learning.
When am I going to do my thinking? And that led me to say.
Okay, I think it's time to write another book. And then I actually analyzed the patterns in the tweets that I had done that were getting the most interest, and I noticed that a lot of them were about being open minded and questioning our opinions and assumptions and even letting go of some of our expertise. And that led into Think Again.
So here we are, and on the topic of rethinking things and learning. You talk about in Think Again, setting a weekly time for rethinking and unlearning, and I'd love you to take me through an example of what you do during this time. How structured is it? Are there questions that you ask yourself, like, what would I observe if I was a fly on the wall?
You'd be really bored? Ammthha.
I doubt that.
I'd just be sitting there, you know, occasionally typing things. And sometimes I'll do it on the elliptical or when I'm taking out the garbage, but most of the time it's in front of my computer. And they have a couple of different routines that I've tried so far, though this is still a pretty new practice for me. I've been doing it less than a year. So one version of it is I go through old ideas that I've produced. It might be an academic paper I wrote, It could
be a chapter from a book. It might be a social media post, it could be a podcast episode, might be a TED talk, And I ask myself, Okay, is there something here worth rethinking? And I cringe a little bit when I do that, because I think a lot of my work is at least mildly embarrassing. I'm like, well, I guess it was the best I could have done at the time, but it was so it was so pedestrian and oversimplified and I have a much richer view
of the topic. Now, I'm like, Okay, I can either be embarrassed by that, or I can say maybe I've grown and that. That's one routine that I've come to appreciate, if not enjoy, just to say, all right, let me let me revisit my old work and see if there's something I've already rethought or something I should rethink when I look at it with the fresh eye of somebody who hasn't seen it in a while and kind of forgot that I produced it.
So that's one What else are you doing in that time to provoke rethinking and unlearning?
So another thing that I've done is I've reached out to people in my challenge network and said, Okay, this shouldn't always be an independent activity.
It doesn't. We don't do all of our rethinking in a vacuum.
I think we do most of it in dialogue or at least in interaction with other people. And so I've picked the people who are my most thoughtful critic, and sometimes I'll just shoot them a note and say, hey, what do you think I should rethink?
I've heard you talk about your challenge network a few times and I'd love it if you could explain how it came about, like how you set one up and the logistics of how do you utilize it and how can other people set one up?
So I think of my challenge network as the It's the perfect compliment to a support network. Everybody has a support network, right, group of cheerleaders who encourage you and build you up. And I think obviously we need them, especially when we're discouraged or down. But I guess I benefited more from a challenge network those thoughtful critics who have very high expectations of me and see a lot of potential in me, but also are fearless about telling
me when I've fallen short of it. And we'll highlight the gap between where I am and where I want to be. So I'll give you, I guess, a taste of how I've done this. This is very how I work talking about how I work.
Look at that correct aligns with the name of the show, so I think that works.
I'm so sorry to be so literal, Amantha, But how I work my challenge network is When I was writing Think Again, I had a couple of different practices for it. So one was I have a research lab called the Impact Lab that I've been, i guess, running since two
thousand and three. And I told them we were going to meet probably every other week, and I'd have a chapter draft for them to read and eviscerate, just tear it apart, tell me everything that's wrong with it, and we would meet and I'd ask them, if you have comments in advance, send them so I can digest them up front.
If not, just tell me.
What you think is wrong with each draft once we sit down, and my favorite practice with the group is to say, let's just start out. We're going to go around the room and give the draft a zero to ten rating. No one ever gives a ten, and that has two effects. Number one, it motivates them to coach me.
Right.
They might be pretty shy about criticizing my work coming in, but when they say four and a half, great, tell me how it could be better. I'm aiming for a ten here, And then they're not worried that they're hurting my feelings. They realize this is going to help me. And the other effect that has is it motivates me to be coachable. If you just told me, here are the three things that I thought were terrible in your draft,
I'm sure, and I've done this many times. I would have some defensive impulses like, wow, I made that choice for the following reasons, and I don't think you've really thought this through when you tell me this draft is a six. All of a sudden, I don't care what I disagree with you on. I want to know how I can make it a ten in your eyes. And so I become much more coachable and open to feedback
after that. So I did a bunch of that with my students, which was invaluable, and just rewrote multiple chapters from scrap multiple times.
I love that idea of scoring things out of ten, and I feel like it all also takes it away from it being a personal critique. It's more like, well, let's focus on the number and how we can get that closer to ten. It's interesting. So I got onto the book humor seriously from your amazing reading recommendations that you do. I think once a quarter you do them.
Yeah.
Yeah, I've started doing them quarterly, and I hope you haven't regretted read the books that I've put on them.
They're all brilliant, and I must say I loved Humor Seriously. It was one of my favorite reads over the summer down here, which I guess is your winter and.
I, oh, I'm so glad have you had Jennifer and Naomi on the podcast yet.
I actually interviewed Naomi yesterday and she was amazing, and I was asking her just how does she make her writing so funny? I mean, Humor Seriously is probably the funniest business book that I've ever read. And she described what I kind of likened a human network, kind of like your challenge network, but essentially she will give the draft to a bunch of comedy writers and ask them to find and markup opportunities for humor, which I thought,
that's that's so fascinating. For making your work funny out such a novel approach.
I think it makes perfect sense.
And when you gather a group like that for feedback, right in Hollywood, they call it notes like I'm going to give you notes, and I love how non threatening that is because there's no judgment there. These are just my notes, and they might have been margin notes. They might be little notes from me to you on what I thought you could improve or where you missed an opportunity.
But they're just notes, take them or leave them. And so my student group is one place I think that ends up being just an incredible source of new ideas and constructive criticism. The other thing that I did was I reached out to a bunch of the people who have given me the best challenging feedback over my career and I said, Hey, you may not know this, but I consider you a founding member of my Challenge network.
And then I had to blain what a challenge network was, but I said, listen, if you ever hesitate to give me real feedback because you're afraid you're going to damage the relationship, don't. The only way you can damage the relationship is by not telling me the truth.
And I've gotten much better feedback after that.
And so I just recorded a new TED talk around think Again, and I went back to the Challenge Network and I said, Okay, here's my draft. Tear it apart, give me the zero to ten rating, tell me what you do you would do differently. And I think the version I recorded was the thirtieth draft, after throwing three complete drafts away and starting over entirely.
Wow, I actually wanted to ask you about designing keynote presentations because in Think Again, there are so many different great strategies for helping people think again, and I was curious as to how you apply those strategies when you are constructing a keynote presentation, and particularly one that's off the back of Think Again. So can you talk about some of the strategies that you use to help think Again with the design of a presentation?
Sure?
So, I don't recommend doing a typical talk like a TED talk, because the challenge of doing a TED talk is you have a constrained window of time and so you want to make every second count and it's much shorter than a keynote you would normally give. Right, So, I guess I think about a typical keynote speech is probably in the thirty to forty five minute range.
I would say, is this sweet spot at most events.
And my vision for that is to start out by asking, what's the core insight that I want to convey. There needs to be a big idea that you take away, ideally one that intrigues you or surprises you or makes you think again. And then something that I was resistant to doing for a long time, but I'm regretting having not done it sooner now that I've finally embraced it is not just to ask what I want the audience to rethink, but also what I want them to feel.
That was something I learned from my TED coaches, who said, look, I understand that you want to shift people's understanding, but.
People are moved through emotion.
Well, long story short, I realized that's the way that I've done a lot of my rethinking is through emotion. And so I decided that I wanted to surprise people and entertain people and fascinate people, and let me think
about the best ways to do that. And then once I'm clear on the big insight and the key emotions that I want to create from there, it's just a matter of saying, Okay, what are the major studies that I want to highlight or pieces of evidence, and what are the stories that I think would best illuminate those,
and now let me sequence those. So there's a nice mix of stories and studies and then some audience interaction to get people thinking and participating and not just sitting there passively listening, but actually processing the material and applying it and experiencing it. And then I basically get on stage, and I have a bunch of slides that are images, and I talk, and I have my points, and I hope that the studies and stories end up about the right length of time.
That's my process, what is yours?
I think I start with the question, with the time that I've given, how can I be most useful to the audience, Like how can I serve them best? And then like, presumably I've got a theme that I'm working with or a particular topic, and then I think, okay, to serve them best, like what are the let's say, for a standard length keynote, what are the five best things I know about this that I think can really have a significant impact in the people's lives that I'm
talking to. And then from there I'd get more into the mechanics of going, okay, well, each point needs some kind of a story or some sort of interactive activity. And now, obviously for the last year I've just been
doing virtual keynotes. I haven't seen a live audience since February twenty twenty, So I think that's my process and trying to go, oh, what's the best story I can tell here to really land this point and connect with people emotionally and then the other thing I think about, and I was actually talking about this with Naomi yesterday in the interview, is that one of my really early coaches around giving presentations would always say, Okay, make it funnier,
make it funnier, insert a joke here. You need more laughs here. And so I also think about laughs per minute, Like I'll go back over a presentation that I've given and I'll look at how many laughs I'm getting per minuted, and where there's maybe a flat period of two minutes, I'll be like, oh, I need to inject some humor there. So I think that's my process loosely.
That's fascinating. Okay, I have a couple of questions for you on this. Yes, let's start with the last point. So I have done the same thing for a long.
Time, have you.
Yes, I've I had a target like, okay, at least one laugh per minute, otherwise this is not entertaining enough.
I'm so reassured to know that you do this and I'm not some weird.
Aerre Oh no, absolutely.
And I've started to rethink it though, And I wonder what you think of the rethinking here. So what I realized was I mean part of the reason that I want to make the audience laugh is I just I love to be entertained, right, I love to laugh, and so I think we all enjoy giving the things that
we love to receive. And that's fine. But I also realized at some point that I'm drawn to laughter because as a shy introvert who used to be terrified of public speaking, I still look at the audience for signals that they're with me, and laughter is really the only reliable cue that I'm having an impact in real time. Right, They're like, well, let's let's take some alternative emotions. So if you inspire people, they don't go ooh.
I wish they I did, though, that would be great.
I mean, if there was an involuntary human response, like a vocal burst for inspiration, that.
Would be helpful, right, Yes, definitely.
I mean occasionally people will, in very rare circumstances though applaud, but that's not a norm in most talks, and it would be sort of disruptive, I think if it happened regularly. I think when people have moments where they're surprised, right,
they don't gasp out loud. And so I started to think that maybe I was over indexing on laughter, that I was using humor as a crutch to feel the audience's energy, as opposed to saying, okay, there's a range of emotions that I want to cultivate here, and yes, I want to make the audience laugh as often as possible, but I don't need to do that in every minute. There are moments of gravity that should be balanced out
by the levity in different parts. But can you imagine if Martin Luther King Junior got on stage for his I have a Dream speech and say I want to have I want to have at least a laugh for a minute, A.
Wrong term for.
Trying to dismantle a racist set of institutions. So I wonder what you make of O this.
I love that it's almost a sense of relief. I feel to go, oh, I don't have to be so had on myself to really push for humor, because sometimes it comes naturally, but other times it's a real struggle. And it's also, just, let's face it, like a bit of a hassle to go, well, you know, look, I've got all the points and these are solid points, and
oh god, now I have to be funny. So I like that I feel like it takes the pressure off, but also it's going to lead to a better outcome in terms of going, Okay, what is the most I guess useful emotion for the audience to be feeling in order to really internalize the idea that I'm trying to get across to them. So I'm going to try that.
I think that's a great way to capture it. And I think I guess it goes to one other thought on this before I ask my other question that you were listening for me. I think that sometimes in the best talks, the audience is so absorbed in the story that telling a joke would jolt them out of it. You're kind of ruining their flow experience. And there are times when you're telling a story that's powerful enough that they're transported into it right They're the protagonist. They're waiting
for the complicating action or the resolution. And so I've sometimes found that when I'm telling, especially a personal story, I'm like, Okay, I'm putting myself out here. I'm being a little vulnerable right now, let me make a joke to lighten the mood. Like no, I need to suspend that temptation, like I don't. I'm not going to eliminate
it all together. I am going to make fun of myself at some point because I feel like that will, especially if I'm talking about something that went well for me, That'll prevent me from coming across as arrogant, and it'll be a way to project the humility that I aspire to live with. But I'm at least gonna postpone it. I'm not going to let myself go for the easy joke right away.
Now tell me your second question before I take back the host role from you.
Yeah, no, no, I prefer to be the one asking the questions here. After all, I want to keep learning.
So I think it's interesting when you talked about what your goal is and your talks, you said that I want to be useful to the audience and I want to have impact. And I wonder how much of that is because you do so much speaking on innovation, which is around a set of practical challenges that the audience is grappling with. Because I guess just give a little context for why I was wondering. I was thinking, what's the alternative to useful and impact? And I think it's
novel and interesting or at least that's one alternative. And so I wonder what's behind the desire to help as opposed to just to intrigue and spark curiosity.
Yeah, that's a really interesting question. It's funny because for me, I think of novelty as that's just a hygiene factor. In terms of like marketing speak, it's just a cost of entry, like you have to be novel otherwise people can probably just find the information online somewhere and likewise being entertaining in some way. Again, it's like that's just
a cost of entry to be a good speaker. And then in terms of being useful, I think it probably comes back to being quite similar to you in terms of growing up being very introverted and shy, and even just raising my hand in class to ask a question made me incredibly nervous. And I feel like if I'm useful, then that gives me permission to be there. It gives me permission to speak and for people to listen to me. So I think that's where that comes from.
That resonates.
It's very similar to how I felt in a lot of situations because when I heard you say useful and impact, I thought, well, okay, that's language that I often use to.
Feel like I matter, right, Like what am I doing here? Well?
Like I want to be helpful, okay, and I want to justify that my time was well spent and then it benefits other people. And then I started thinking one of my biggest frustrations as a speaker is you don't really know when you've been useful like that. Getting real feedback about your long term impact is challenging. I've thought
about how do you measure it? This is a hard problem, and so I think I've shifted a little bit away from that just knowing how ambiguous it is to say, all right, if I can create a performance that people find to be a thought provoking experience, then I can know at the end that I sort of succeeded, as opposed.
To wondering like was this useful? Did I have impact?
And so I guess I'm giving myself a different out than the one you've chosen.
Well, I like your questions to me, and it's really interesting hearing your process. I know that when I do the edit for this interview, I'm I'm going to rethink again when I can, you know, really focus and have the time to consider it.
We think again, that sounds like a sequel that I will not be rating.
Definitely.
Now.
When I was preparing for this interview, I reached out to Rev, who is a collaborator of yours, Reb Rebel, and someone that introduced me to I think two and a half years ago, shortly after I first had you on the show.
Was two and a half years ago, Yeah, two.
And a half years ago, Yes, a long time ago. And Reb and I catch up every few months, and that's been wonderful. It's fantastic. And I said, what do you reckon? I should ask Adam about basically delegating my prep work to Rev, and he said, you should ask him about remote collaboration because pre COVID you were doing a lot of remote collaboration, and obviously now in the last twelve months, I'm imagining that you've done a hell
of a lot more. And I'm wondering what one or two strategies that you find really help to elevate the effectiveness and the outputs from collaborating remotely.
So Burstina is a place to start. This is researched by Chris Reedal and Anito Wooley, where they studied remote software teams and they found that there are two kinds of communication patterns in remote collaboration. One is high frequency, relatively low intensity, like we talk every day or we have emails kind of going every hour. The other is the opposite. It's low frequency, high intensity. We don't talk for a week, and then we have a two hour
jam session. And they wanted to know which model is more productive and more creative. And whenever I present this, this is something I've been talking a lot with founders and CEOs about, whenever I present it, they say overwhelmingly, over eighty percent of the people I've asked have said, you want high frequency, you need to stay in touch, you need to be on the same page in order
to work effectively with people. And the data showed the exact opposite, that the more productive and creative remote collaborations are low frequency, high intensity. And what seems to be going on there is a couple of things. One, when people are communicating only intermittently, they actually have time to get their own individual work done and to move ideas forward.
And two, when they do then come together to collaborate, they're working with much better material and they're also more motivated. I thought that that meant, okay, they're going to be excited to build on each other's ideas. But the data tell a slightly different story, which is that it is energizing to know that other people are there waiting to respond to you. And the pattern of burstiness is the sense that the collaboration is literally bursting with energy and ideas.
And the way you get that you don't need to be in the same physical space to get that. What helps, though, is being in the same temporal space right having your calendar synced so that there are at least some hours here and there where you're online at the same time and you can actually work together in real time. And that The part of the reason this resonated with me is it's how I've collaborated since gosh, at least fifteen years ago, when at a mentor Jane Dutton, who would
work on papers with her former students. So Jane was at the University of Michigan where I was in grad school.
Her former students would graduate and go across the country or to another continent, and they would stay in touch, or they'd have occasional phone calls and occasional emails, and then they would fly in and they would do a three day blitz where they just deep dive on a project and they sit side by side writing and they basically spend every waking hour together and then they go off and they don't interact that much for a month
or two. And you're really getting the best of both worlds in that model of independent thinking and then collaborative contribution. And so that's a mon for how I structure my remote collaboration.
Do we really need face to face collaboration to optimize problem solving and creative thinking? I mean, there's so many businesses here in Australia that are insisting that people go back to the office. We're not in lockdown here anymore. But do we need it? Like, is there something special that we get from face to face collaboration based on the research, that we just can't get from virtual collaboration.
I don't know.
That's not the answer I was looking for, Adam.
It's the only empirical answer I have right now. What I can tell you is this seems to be true in pairs and also in teams that trust builds faster and it also builds deeper when people are face to face. But what do we take away from that, I don't know. Does that mean we are evolutionarily wired to need to be in the same physical space as other people in order to trust them, that we need to be able
to potentially touch them. Is that just how we've always done it and so we're most comfortable trusting under those circumstances. Or is it the case that up until now, and maybe not until three years from now, the technology just hasn't been there, and so virtual has been just an awful proxy for face to face. And when we get to the point where we're kind of lifelike holograms, maybe face to face becomes irrelevant. And maybe for some people
touch is important and for others it's not. I don't know, but I don't think there's anything about human psychology that leaves me convinced that we have to be physically in the same room to trust each other and collaborate effectively. I think there are aspects of being physically colocated that maybe grease the wheels of trust a little bit and
make it easier. But I think that gap is going to shrink as technology gets better, and also as we get more comfortable but really trusting people that we've never met face to face.
Yeah, I know that Jane Dutton was one of your mentors, and she's obviously very well known for writing and researching about high quality connections. I'm curious as to how you use her work when you're collaborating with new people in terms of I guess fast tracking human connection.
Well, Jane does a rapid high quality connection exercise where I've been using this in class for years, ever since she had me do.
It as a student.
She says, just pair up with someone that you haven't met in class yet, or if you've met everyone, like somebody you don't know well, and then you each have a minute to try to build a high quality connection with the other person, and it's stunning to see how quick it happens. People are often amazed by their their intuitive social intelligence when it comes to finding strategies to do it, and I think the strategies that seem to work are backed up by decades of evidence in psychology.
One is self disclosure, where you know where people make themselves vulnerable and what that actually That helps the person who's sharing as much or more than the person who's listening, because when I tell you something personal about me, then I am signaling to myself, well, I must trust you otherwise, Why the hell did I just tell you that? What am I thinking? This is a dangerous decision here? I
should probably rethink it. So that happens a lot. There's a lot of people searching for uncommon commonalities, you know, things they share that are rare, and people bond in those ways. I think though, for me, the key ingredient there is that the exercise is set up so that you just erase uncertainty that the other person wants to connect and knowing that I'm going to talk to you for a minute and we share a goal of having
a high quality interaction, it dramatically lowers anxiety. And it also it leads people to do Oh, I guess the goatmans would call them like they're bids.
Right.
I make an offer, a gesture to say, hey, I'm seeking your friendship or your trust, and I know you're going to reciprocate, and you're eager to do that, and then it kind of spirals from there. It's like when the beginning of a first date goes really well and you stop questioning whether the other person likes you. So, I guess this is all to say, I've tried to think about these principles in some of my new virtual collaborations to like I've just tried to put it out there, like, Hey,
we're going to be working together. It's important to me that we trust each other. And so I'm going to tell you something that I don't normally share. And then I'll try to come up with something that I normally would hesitate to share, but I think is something that if I am going to trust someone, they ought to know about me. So like I'll maybe start with a simple one, like I am chronically late.
I apologize events for it.
I'm trying to get better at it, but not always making progress. And then I might go into something a little bit more personal, depending on what topic comes up, and say, like I've written whole book about rethinking, and I've noticed there are certain situations where I get really stubborn and strong willed to the point that I worry I'm close minded, and I'm trying to get better at flexing in those situations and delegating, and I hope you can help me do that.
You mentioned that you ask someone that is often late because you get into flow and you don't want to break it. And I experience that. But what I do is I set the stopwatch on my Apple Watch so I don't lose track of time. And I'm a really punctual person. I'm often early. But I want to know, do you recommend that I be more selfish with my time and not do this and be late to things like you are.
I don't know that I would wish my faults on anyone, but I do think there's a method to the madness here.
I think, yeah, I want to lose track of time.
If I'm in flow and I was late to something and it wasn't an emergency and I can make up for it, it's totally worth it to me. And I guess I don't see it as being selfish, because I'm usually working on something that's gonna reach somebody else or that's going to help someone else, and so I guess I see it not as selfishness, but more is refusing to be a slave to the social construction of clock time and not privileging the person that I thought was going to get my time at this one point over
the other people who are priorities for me too. So I don't know, I reject the premise. I don't think it's selfishness, particularly if other people know that sometimes you're running late. And I'll tell you, I don't meant that I'm thrilled when people are late, like great, I have more time to work, thank you. At minimum, I can catch up on some emails or write a little post that I'm delinquent in doing. And so I've just never understood why people reify this fiction.
Of a clock into something much bigger than it is.
That's great, I'm going to see if I can reframe my thinking. I know that I'm going to struggle with it, but it maybe does require a rethink.
I think. I don't know. I don't know.
I mean, I think this is probably something that different people have different preferences on.
But I am surprised.
I remember when I wrote I must have tweeted about how being late is not necessarily disrespecting the person who's waiting for you. Sometimes it's respecting that person who's sitting in front of you. And I was surprised at how many people responded with some version of moral outrage, like being late is not a violation of an ethical principle, it's just you taking time more seriously than I do, Like I take my commitments to people and projects seriously, not to a clock or a calendar.
Such a good way of looking at it.
I don't know, I don't know.
It makes some people frustrated, but like, okay, if it really frustrates you, you should not schedule appointments with me, and you will be happy.
Hey, there, it's nearly time for a little ad break. But can I ask a favor of you? If you're enjoying how I work, I would be so grateful if you could hit pause on this episode and pop into Apple Podcasts or wherever you're listening to this from and leave a review. You can do this through scrolling down to the bottom of the show notes and clicking on the stars, or running a comment. Aside from the warm, fuzzy feelings, this will give both you and me. It
helps other people find out about how I work. So thank you in advance. Okay, Adam Grant will be back after this short break and we're going to be chatting about how being a magician, which Adam is, has influenced his work in psychology. Now, something I imagine, in terms of sharing things about you that a lot of listeners probably wouldn't know, is that you're a magician, and I think that's so cool.
The nerdiest thing in my life. For sure. You think it's cool, gotta love it totally.
Like my idea of a great night out is going to the Magic Castle in La Amazing.
So I want to know how does.
Magic influence the work that you do as an organizational psychologist.
The biggest thing that magic did for me was it taught me to appreciate the element of surprise. When I was performing as a magician regularly, that I could do the same trick like, let's say, I'm going to have you pick a card. So one of my favorite tricks that I learned early on was I have the audience.
Pick a card.
I actually I put the cards on the table and I say, look, I don't want to influence your choice. You choose your own card, and I have you pick and I'm halfway across the room. I'm turning around so that I can't see anything. I'm staring into the wall, and you look at your card. You then shuffle it back into the deck. And when I first started performing, I would just grab the deck and I would find your card, and you were like, oh cool. And then I thought Okay, I'm going to add a little flourish
to it. And I learned to throw the cards up and then as all the cards are falling from the sky or the ceiling, to catch one card and then I turn it around and it's your card. Ah, And there's a little more suspense built. But that version of the trick was nowhere near as satisfying in the reveal as when I went an extra step. And that This is a trick I do every year in class with
my undergrads. Thanks to a student innovation, all my students get a chance to do a one minute passion talk about something they love or something that matters deeply to them to introduce themselves to their classmates, and we do six each class, so that by the end of the semester everyone is given one. And throughout the semester they asked me, when are you giving your passion talk, and I say, I'm going to do it on the last day.
And the last day, my passion talk is about learning to do magic and how it helped me come out of my shell.
And then I do a trick or two.
And so I do this same trick, except now the way I do it is I've had you shuffle your card back.
Into the deck.
Then I take the deck and I say, okay, Amantha. You may not know this, but when you were holding your card for a second, you actually transferred some body heat into it and you warmed it up. So I'm just gonna flip through eyes closed, I'm gonna find the hottest card in the deck. Boom, is that yours? And I deliberately show you the wrong card? Ah, And you're like no. And I think my acting is not always up to par, but every once in a while I
get it right. And I look kind of like shocked, and then forlorn, and and I might I might curse, and then and then I just I throw the cards up as if I'm giving up, and then I.
Catch your card.
And now right now you're Wow, You're You're much more excited and surprised. And what that taught me this is a very long story, but what it taught me was that we can do the same thing with ideas, we can do the same thing with knowledge. And as an organizational psychologist, that meant that when I had a data point that I thought was interesting, I needed to work really hard to not only tell the audience what was surprising about it, but set them up to feel surprised.
I don't.
I'm like in magic, I don't want to trick them. What I want to do is figure out what expectation they hold, what assumption they cling to that the evidence I'm going to share might question, And then I want to tell the story or reveal the results of the experiment in such a way that they feel the same surprise that they should, and that I don't think I would have appreciated that if I hadn't done magic.
From a purely selfish point of view. I'm on an eight week mission where I'm trying to learn a magic trick awake and really, I mean yeah, yeah, and i mean wait why, Because someone asked me a few weeks ago, what's something that you've always want wanted to learn but haven't And I'm like, I can't think of anything. I just like, I just do it if I want to
learn it. But I'm like, no magic. Like every time I visit the Magic Castle, I'm like, oh, I want to learn something and I want to become a member, and I get really excited and I do nothing. And so I learned a trick last week and it didn't fool many people, but it filled a couple and that was okay. And then I learned another trick, but it involved a rubber band, and I can't find the right
rubber band to do the trick with. So tell me what is the trick that I can learn that requires little skill but it's going to have a really big impact.
So one trick that I think is low effort high impact is one where I guess we'll have to wait till COVID is over. But you're in Australia, You're going to be in a restaurant much sooner than I am.
So next time you go to a restaurant, what you're going to do is you're going to cover assault shaker with a napkin or like a tablecloth, and you're going to to tell your friends at dinner that you're going to make a coin disappear that you're going to put under the salt shaker and the napkin, and then you put the coin down, you cover it, You say, okay,
let me just make sure the coin is here. You hold up the salt shaker and the napkin, then you put it back down, You cover the coin, and then you say okay on the counter three one two three, the coin will disappear. Then you slam the table, you smash the salt shaker, only the salt shaker is gone and the coin.
Is still there.
Oh my gosh.
And then if you want, you could have the salt shaker appear under the table, or it could just be gone.
What how do I do this?
After we stop recording, I'll tell you how to do it.
Oh my god, am I seeing it?
I met that. I wanted to ask you. I wanted to rethink your question a little bit. Hmm.
What if instead of learning a trick a week, you decided to learn a skill a week, a magic skill that a magician would use.
Oh I like that, and I never would have thought of them because I don't know enough about magic to go. Ah, that's another way to categorize learning. So what would be say two or three skills that if I were to reframe the challenge that I should learn.
Well, let's just say a word about why.
I think that might be part of what I heard you saying was I love being in the audience for magic and I would like to be able to create it.
Yes, And I think the if you just do a trick a week.
At some point you're going to give up on that goal, and that's going to be the sum total of your abilities. So you'll be able to do six tricks right or eight tricks, and you won't really feel like you know how to do magic. It's like you're in the movie The Matrix and you've downloaded six programs and you can play those programs. Whereas if you learn six skills, you could potentially, over time, without having to ever learn a new skill, create one hundred or two hundred different tricks.
And also then there's a learning curve where one skill could lead to another, as opposed to I'm just going to learn a bunch of screet performances and they're all standalone. So I guess it depends on your medium. What kinds of tricks do you love to watch the most? Are you a stage illusioned person? Are you close up coins or cards?
Close up cards, I would say would be my favorite genre.
Mine too.
I'm better at cards than everything else combined, which is not a brag about my card skills, it's a.
I am in every other domain.
Yeah, So in cards, I would say, get a card magic book. I would say the classic is dive Vernon. There are lots of more recent ones, though, and you could say, Okay, one week, I'm going to learn a particular shuffle that gives me control over certain cards. The next week, I'm going to learn a cut, the next week,
I'm going to learn a lift. And you know, each of these techniques then can be used in all these different card tricks, and sometimes, like my favorite card tricks, I use eight or nine different skills and it's a much more exciting revelation at the end. So I think you could create just a whole I guess it's a different way of saying it is.
It's an investment in.
Being able to keep producing dividends on the time you spent learning.
Yes, gosh, I feel like this has just re energized me towards this magic goal that I have. I'm totally going to adopt that. That's awesome.
Thank you trying it at your own risk.
Now, I know I've only got a few minutes left with you. I did want to ask you a question about parenting, because I know you do quite a bit of writing in this area, and you've written two children's books with your wife Alison, which myself and my seven year old daughter have.
Loved and oh, thank you.
That's so good. And I want to know what are like two or three questions that you think are really good questions to ask our children every day?
What are you trying to teach them?
I guess what I was thinking about is I read that article. I want to say it was in The Atlantic where you talked about the importance of raising people that are kind. And this is something that I think a lot about with my daughter Frankie, and so, for example, every day, and I think it was inspired by that article that you wrote. I asked her what's something kind that you did? And sometimes She'll say, I don't know, And other times I'll go, well, what's something kind that
someone did for you? And how did that make you feel? And that's literally a daily conversation that we have. So that's what made me want to ask the question because I was curious, what are some other things that you're doing with your kids to praise them to be really good, decent, kind human beings.
Well, one that I actually learned from our ten year old daughter, Elena is she taught our seven year old son Henry to every night ask us a question.
M and vice versa.
So we read a bad time story and then when it's time to turn the lights out, we each ask, what's your question? I think it's a beautiful way to encourage curiosity. But also teaching kids to ask questions is one of the most basic building blocks of nurturing kindness and a sincere interest in others. And so I think asking your kids what questions do you have? Or what question do you have today? What do you wonder about? What puzzled you, what intrigues you, what do you not understand?
What do you not know?
A great way to get them to take an interest in others and also an interest in learning.
That is so cool. I'm picking my daughter up from school in three hours and I'm so going to be asking her.
That it's fun.
She might say nothing, and then you can ask her a question and model the behavior, and it becomes fun to say, Okay, who can.
Think of a question we've never asked before.
So it's almost it's become like a nightly challenge to say, all right, we've gone through you know who's your favorite superhero? And you know why is Pluto no longer a Planet's Let's come up with something really novel.
Now, I've got three final questions for you, and let's treat them as rapid fire questions. So first, I want to know what, like the last time I had you on the show. I remember I asked for it was your favorite research study that you've read recently, and you gave me a great one around how meetings and not batching meetings wastes a great deal of time. And I want to know what's your favorite research from say, the last year, that's made you rethink something.
For a long time, I've believed that the reason we get so many narcissists and leadership positions is organizations are designed to reward people who kiss up and kick down and who who project confidence as a false signal of confidence.
And I've had to.
Rethink that because there was a fascinating Dutch study that came out this year showing that narcissistic leaders are even popular in elementary school classrooms ages seven to fourteen that I think the original The data were hundreds of kids in twenty three different classrooms, and in twenty two of those classes rooms, then most narcissistic kids were more likely to be nominated as leaders, and they also rated themselves as better leaders even though they weren't any better at leadership.
And I guess what I've rethought there is I thought this was a problem with our workplaces, and now I think it's a much more fundamental problem with the way that we teach, the way that we organize both kids and adults into hierarchies, the way that we put a premium on confidence instead of humility. And so I think that we need to counter the preference for narcissistic leaders much earlier than I thought before.
That is fascinating. Tell me you read so many books. What is a book that you've read in the last year that made you rethink something and that you'd recommend that other people read as well.
Oh, there are a lot of those.
I think Untamed by Glennon Doyle is an easy one, though. Glennon is I think one of the most gifted writers on earth. And I shouldn't even say gifted because that suggests that it just came to her natural, when I know she's worked extraordinarily hard to have such a brilliant and poignant voice. And one thing that I rethought based on reading her book is my view of happiness.
There's a line that stopped me in my tracks.
I think the exact quote is being human is not about feeling happy, it's about feeling everything.
What a great quote.
Yeah, I mean the book is full of observations like that, and it really made me pause to say, well, what am I doing here? Am I limiting my range of experience by pursuing happiness? And am I encouraging other people to make the same mistake.
My final question for you, Adam, is a very easy one for people that want to consume more of what you are doing and also get their hands on a copy of Think Again. How should people do that?
Oh, it's extremely kind of you to ask.
I would say the easy way is to go to Adam grant dot net. There's a free quizy you can take to figure out your style of rethinking, and a discussion guide for the book, and a bunch of other information that may or may not be of interest.
Amazing, And people can subscribe to your newsletter there as well, which is one of the newsletters that I get that I actually look forward to receiving. It's always just awesome. Oh, thank you, pleasure, Adam, Thank you so much for coming on the show again. It's just such a highlight and privileged to chat to you, so thank you so much, my pleasure. That is it for today's show. If you enjoyed it, why not share it with someone that you
think would also enjoy it. And next week on How I Work, I am very excited to have Naomi Bagdonus on the show. Naomi teaches humor, yes, of course, on humor for Stanford Business School, and we get into the mechanics of how to telligence and how to just be funnier. So if you're keen to hear about that, hit subscribe or follow wherever you're listening to this podcast from and
you'll be alerted when that episode drops. How I Work is produced by Inventium with production support from Dead Set Studios. The producer for this episode was the marvelous Jenna Coda, and thank you to Martin Nimba who did the audio mix and makes everything sound better than it would have otherwise. That's all for today and I'll see you next time.