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

Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. Adam Grant. Adam Grant is a professor of organizational psychology at the Wharton School at University of Pennsylvania. He has authored five best-selling books and most recently has authored a new book entitled Hidden Potential.

He received his bachelor's degree from Harvard University and his doctorate from the University of Michigan. Today we discuss peer-reviewed studies and tools based on the data from those studies that can enable people to meet their goals and overcome significant challenges, including how to overcome procrastination, as well as how to see around or through blind spots, as well as how to overcome sticking points in motivation and creativity.

We also discuss the research on and practical tools related to the underpinnings of performance in any endeavor, including how to increase one's confidence and how to have a persistent growth mindset. By the end of today's episode, it will be clear to you that Dr. Adam Grant has an absolutely spectacular depth and breadth of knowledge, and that knowledge is both practical, it is based on peer-reviewed research, and he conveys those tools with the utmost clarity and generosity.

Indeed, by the end of today's episode, you will have more than a dozen new tools. Never discussed before on the Uberman Lab podcast that you can apply in your academic endeavors, in athletic endeavors, in creative endeavors, in fact in any area of life.

Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research rules at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is 8 Sleep. 8 Sleep makes smart mattress covers with cooling, heating, and sleep tracking capacity.

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8 Sleep currently ships in the USA, Canada, the UK, select countries in the EU, and Australia. Again, that's 8Sleep.com slash Huberman. Today's episode is also brought to us by levels. Levels is a program that lets you see how different foods affect your health by giving you real-time feedback on your diet using a continuous glucose monitor. One of the most important factors in your immediate and long-term health is your blood sugar or blood glucose regulation.

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I started using the Waking Up app a few years ago, because even though I've been doing regular meditation since my teens, and I started doing yoga knee-dra about a decade ago, my dad mentioned to me that he had found an app, turned out to be the Waking Up app, which could teach you meditations of different durations, and that had a lot of different types of meditations to place the brain and body into different states.

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If you'd like to try the Waking Up app, you can go to wakingup.com slash huberman and access a free 30-day trial. Again, that's wakingup.com slash huberman to access a free 30-day trial. And now for my discussion with Dr. Adam Grant. Adam, welcome. Excited to be here. Very excited to have you here. Your career, both public facing and academic career, have covered an enormous range of topics. So we have a lot to cover. Look who's talking.

And anytime two professors sit down, or even one professor says, we have a lot to cover. I think everyone listening braces themselves like, oh no, but these topics, I assure everyone, are of the utmost importance. And you cover them in such both fabulous detail and you make it very clear. So I'm really looking forward to this. I'd like to start off by talking about something that I'm obsessed by. And I know a lot of people are obsessed with and struggle with.

And I know you also have a recent publication on this topic, which is procrastination. I am a bit of a procrastinator. But a different way of stating that is that I love deadlines. I learned in college that I love, love, love deadlines because it seems to harness my focus and my attention. I like just enough, I guess you call it anxiety or autonomic arousal for the neuroscience or physiology oriented folks. For me, just brings about a total elimination of all of the distractors.

And it seems to both slow and accelerate my perception of time. And it seems to bring out my best to have deadlines. But I would prefer to not have to procrastinate in order to self-impose deadlines. I prefer that other people impose those deadlines, in fact. So what do we know about procrastination? Why do some people complete things well in advance? Why do other people procrastinate is that they're seeking deadlines as I believe I am?

And interestingly, and sort of alluding to this recent paper, viewers, what is the relationship between procrastination and creativity? I feel like we should just deal with all that later. Let's put it off. No, good one. By the way, there's extra credit for science songs on here. What have I done? One of the best articles on procrastination ever written was titled At Last My Article on Procrastination. Fantastic. I love that. Yeah, it just made me smile.

So I think the basic question I think to start with is why do we procrastinate? And I thought I was immune actually when I came into this topic. I was the person who annoyed my college roommates by finishing my thesis a couple months early. I found out there was a term for me. I'm a procrastinator. So the focus and the pressure that you get from a deadline, I get that the moment the project starts. And sometimes months or years in advance. And so I was really proud of finishing everything early.

And then I discovered there are things that I procrastinate on too, which was a little bit disappointing. Are you willing to share what some of those? I am. So I procrastinate on anything that's administrative. So I'm right there with you. You want to get time on my calendar? It could take me weeks to respond. You asked me a question about social science. I will be back to you in a minute. I procrastinate on grading. Takes me forever.

I basically put off a whole bunch of tasks that I thought had nothing in common. It turns out that I procrastinate when I'm bored. Like boredom is, I guess it's probably my most hated emotion. And so I will do anything to avoid a boring task. And I think this goes to why people procrastinate, which is a lot of people think it's laziness. Or you're not disciplined enough. But actually the research on this is really clear that you're not avoiding work when you procrastinate.

In fact, a lot of our procrastination is focused on doing things that involve a lot of energy. You've seen people probably clean their entire houses when they're putting off a task. So it's not that you're being lazy. It's that you're avoiding negative emotions that a task starts up. So for me, it's boredom. For a lot of people, it's fear or anxiety. I don't know if I can pull this off. I have an extreme case of imposter syndrome in this role. The challenge in front of me is too daunting.

For some people it's confusion. I haven't figured it out yet. And so I can't work on this because I feel like I'm stuck. So what's, I guess the big question for you then, Andrews, what's the emotion that causes you to procrastinate? You know, it's hard for me to identify the stick here. I think of it more as the carrot that comes with deadlines. And again, I don't consider myself a procrastinator per se. I just really love deadlines.

And procrastination is a terrific way to simulate the deadline. So for me... So you wait, so you delay starting or finishing a task in order to have a sense of time pressure? That's right. It builds a certain amount of internal rousell need to know, okay, I've got 72 hours to complete something. And it's now game time. I like the game time before the game time. Before a podcast, I'll put in anywhere from, you know, several days to weeks or even months in preparation.

So it's really elastic depending on the topic. But when it came to exams in school or if it comes to writing deadlines, I consider the shipping of the product or the presentation of the live event that I happen to be doing as the second game or event. The first event is the pressure and the excitement of getting into the groove of doing focused work. Because for me, that's such a drug.

I mean, it feels like all having all the systems of my brain and body oriented towards one specific thing is just sheer bliss for me. So it sounds like then you're actually not a chronic procrastinator. Thank you. And I've never... That's never been the way I viewed myself, but now I'll take that. It's a strategy for you. It is a strategy. That's right. And I was fairly wayward to youth, barely finished high school, et cetera.

So by time I got serious about school, which was my second year of university, when deadlines were presented like there's an exam, there's a midterm exam on a given date, that was exciting to me. That was exciting. It was like, okay, that's the big thing. That's my opportunity to prove myself to myself because I was really coming from behind. And then the opportunity to, or I should say, the feeling of dropping into that groove, this is the exciting part is the preparation.

Likewise, for our solo podcast, I love the research as much as I love presenting the material. Maybe more. Likewise for university lectures, or for traveling and giving seminars as a traditional academic. I'm sure you're familiar with that. Of course. The preparation is where you realize it's almost like I think of it as somebody like a minor in a mind, and just finding a gem. And of course, then there are all the thoughts of what you can do with that later.

And you're going to show people that it has a certain value to the world, et cetera. But it's the searching and finding those gems that is, like, even as I talk about it, I feel like my body's going to float out of the chair a little bit. I have the same experience. It's the unleashed curiosity. And then the rush of discovery, and by the time you're teaching it or explaining it, but I already know this. I'm not learning anything anymore.

And yes, I'm excited to share it, and I hope it's helpful to other people. So, you know, I think as you talk about what your process looks like, I don't even think what you do qualifies as procrastination technically. It seems to get better and better. Seriously, if you think about it how procrastination is defined, it's delaying despite an expected cost. And you don't think there's a cost. You actually see a benefit. That's right. And I've tried starting the...

That's not procrastination. That's just delay. Yeah, I've tried starting things earlier. And I should say that my process often begins much earlier than the physical process. Like, if I was being observed in an experiment, be okay, you know, Andrew's finally sitting down to write this book chapter, or, you know, finally sitting down to research some papers for an episode. But I'm thinking about it all the time. Yeah. I mean, much to the dismay of people in my life.

You know, I'm constantly thinking about these things. I mean, walking to take out the recycle, I'll have ideas. And then I'll write them down. I constantly am writing things down. Voice memos into my phone. I have a method of capture where I basically try and just grab everything and then filter out what's useful. Do you have a process like that for gleaning ideas? A little bit. I do now.

So, when... When G. Hitchin and I started this research on procrastination, she had come to me, she was a very creative doctoral student. And she said, I have my best ideas when I'm procrastinating. And it was one of those moments where I didn't believe her. But I thought it was an interesting enough idea that it was worth exploring. And I said, show me. Let's get some data. Let's see if we can test this.

And she ended up gathering data in a Korean company where she surveyed people on how often they procrastinate. And then got their supervisors to rate their creativity. And sure enough, found that people who procrastinate sometimes were rated as more creative than people who rarely do. Like me, the procrastinators. And I remember asking her, what about the chronic procrastinators? And she's like, I don't know, they never filled out my survey.

Yeah, as I recall from that paper, there's an inverted U-shaped function with procrastination on the vertical axis and creativity on the horizontal axis. Fliped, sorry. Okay, so explain to me then the relationship between procrastination and creativity. Yeah, so basically the peak of creativity is in the middle of procrastination. Oh, okay, got it. And yeah, there's an upside down U-curve there. And so then, I thought this was fascinating.

So then, you know, we go into the lab to say, can we replicate this? Can we control it in an experiment? And the hardest part of that was, how do you randomly assign people to procrastinate? To my knowledge, never been done before. And we eventually figured out that we could give people a bunch of tasks to do and then tempt them with highly entertaining YouTube videos that were sort of placed on their screen.

And we put different numbers of YouTube videos there so that, you know, if there's only one you're not tempted to procrastinate much, if there are four, you're probably going to get stuck into a little bit of a YouTube spiral. If there are eight, you might be putting off the test that's much less exciting than, you know, watching Jimmy Kimbell's meet in tweets, for example. And this was done in a fairly naturalistic environment for these folks.

Yeah, people are on a computer. They're asked to, you know, to solve some creative problems that look pretty similar to what you might do in your job. And then we're going to score your creativity later. And it turned out that the people who were tempted to procrastinate moderately ended up generating the most creative ideas.

So why is that? There are a couple of things that happen and you have to look at both sides of the curve. So what's wrong with the pre-crastinators and also what happens to the extreme procrastinators. And in both cases, what happens is you end up with a little bit of tunnel vision. So when I dive right into a task, I'm stuck with my first ideas. And I don't wait long enough to incubate and get my best ideas.

I'm less likely to reframe the problem. I'm less likely to access remote knowledge because I'm just diving right in. And meanwhile, the chronic procrastinators end up in the same boat because they don't get started until the last minute. And so they have to rush ahead with the easiest idea to implement as opposed to really developing the most novel idea.

And meanwhile, the people in the middle who are starting to feel that pressure of, wow, I kind of spun my wheels for 10 minutes watching a bunch of YouTube videos. I'm running out of time for this task. They still have enough time to work on the ideas that were active in the back of their minds. And that gives them a shot at more novel ideas. So I've tried to adopt this to answer question.

I've tried to adopt this as my process now to say I will still dive into a project ahead of schedule, but I will not commit to an idea until I've let it incubate for a few weeks. And I'm working on other things, whereas an earlier version of me, like when I'd sit down to write a book, as soon as I had the book idea, I would start writing on day one.

Now I have the idea, I file it away and I give myself at least a month before I began drafting. And I think it feels less productive, but it's far more creative. What are your thoughts about some of what you described being an unconscious way of seeding the mind and the unconscious with an idea? So for instance, let's take a school academic scenario where students get an assignment and the assignment is contained within a folder and it just says assignment.

Okay, and it's a due and a particular date and it says due on that particular date and they're given the folder, but they have no sense of what the assignment is. You can imagine one category of procrastinator that will take that thing and put it down and avoid looking at it entirely versus another category of procrastinator that will flip it open and take a look. Okay, this is going to be an essay on, you know, I don't know, something about economic theory in the late 1700s.

Close it and then procrastinate. There is an idea, which I frankly I subscribed to a little bit because we recently did this series on mental health, not mental illness, but mental health with Dr. Paul Conti where he talked extensively about the unconscious and how the unconscious mind is always working with ideas, things that we are concerned about performance, these sorts of things, even if we're not aware of them.

What are your thoughts about the creativity that's seeded by slight procrastination being related to actually knowing what you're procrastinating on specifically? I think it turns out to be, I don't want to say essential, but critical. So one of the things we found is in order for moderate procrastination to fuel creativity, you have to be intrinsically motivated by the thing you're procrastinating on. Interesting.

So what happens is if you're bored, for example, by the topic, you're not going to open the folder. You're not going to start thinking about it at all. It's not going to begin, you're not going to do any subconscious processing. You're not going to have any unexpected connections between this topic and something else you've learned about or been curious about. If you're interested in the problem, then when you put it off, you're much more likely to still keep it active in the back of your mind.

And that's when you begin to see, I imagine you could explain the biology of this. I imagine, for example, there's probably more neural networks that are connecting. You probably get access to ideas that previously would have been sort of separate nodes. And so I think that you want to know what the topic is, right? You don't want to just see the blank assignment. But you also have to find a reason that this is exciting to you.

Otherwise, you're going to avoid it as opposed to letting it percolate. That brings us to the topic of intrinsic motivation. And I'd like to link that up with the topic of performance. So when I was in university, there were many topics that I was excited to learn about some more than others, of course. But occasionally, I'd be in a class or I'd get an assignment that, frankly, I had minimal interest in. Never zero, but minimal interest.

And as a way of dealing with that, I embarked on a process of literally lying to myself and just telling myself, okay, I'm super interested in reading this. And I'm going to force myself to be interested in reading it. And lo and behold, I would start falling in love with certain things. Maybe it was even the arrival of a word that I didn't recognize. And then I would go look it up, and I knew I was studying for the GRE at that time.

So I filed that away. I still have my notebooks of all the vocabulary words that I learned in the course of my university courses that, frankly, made the verbal portion of the GRE pretty easy. Which, if you ever try and study for that at the end, it's pretty tough to commit all those new words to memory and context. So I could find little hooks. And through those hooks, I could kind of ratchet my way into a larger interest.

And then lo and behold, I'm really interested in Greek mythology, you know, or actually like that one at first. But I didn't have to trick myself. But, you know, maybe we could spend a little bit of time talking about what is true intrinsic motivation? Is it always reflexive? Can we make ourselves intrinsically motivated about a given topic, or scenario, or group of people? And then let's talk about how intrinsic motivation links to performance.

Because there's a rich literature on this, as I recall, and I remember the Stanford study of rewarding kids for things that were already in terms of their motivation to do. Maybe we could touch on that a little bit and remind people who haven't heard about it. But I'm fascinated by this topic because I feel like so much of life is about doing things that initially we don't feel that excited to do.

And yet succeeding in life, you know, until you can afford to offload your administrative work to somebody else, which hopefully by now you have. That's fine. That's a way to get it done. Right. This is fundamental to being a functional human being, frankly, not just successful in air quotes, but functional. We got to do stuff that we don't enjoy doing. Yeah. So I think we can talk about a couple different ways to nurture intrinsic motivation.

We can think about how the task itself is designed. We can think about reward systems. And then we can think about also the things we say to ourselves and others, which I hope are not lies. Rather persuasive attempts. Let's start on that one, actually. I don't know a lot of people who are that good at deliberate self-deception. Well, I like to think it was only around a particular set of goal-motivated pursuits.

But at that time for me also is survival. As I mentioned, I didn't do well in high school. I really want to perform well in university. But I knew that working just for the grade wasn't going to carry me. It felt catabolic. And I don't know. Maybe at that age, I was still in the window of heightened neuroplasticity. We know it never closes, but I think I also fell in love with the process of learning how to do what I just described.

Yeah. So I think for most people, the best method of self persuasion is actually to convince somebody else. Something of Elliott Erinzen's classic research on cognitive dissonance where he would ask you to go and tell somebody else a task you hated is really interesting. And if he paid you a lot to do it, you still hated the task because you had a justification. I got 20 bucks to kind of fit a little bit about this task. The task is bad, but I did it for the payment.

When you paid you $1 to go and tell somebody that you loved a task that you didn't, you ended up liking it more. Wow. And maybe I shouldn't be surprised, but maybe you should tell me why I shouldn't be surprised. Because I hope people got what you just said very clearly.

If they didn't, if you don't like doing something, going and reporting to somebody else, how great that thing is, so lying about it to somebody else, is one way to increase the degree to which you like or enjoy that behavior or topic. And if you're paid $20 to go lie to somebody in the positive direction, so against your true belief, it's less effective in shifting your underlying affect about that thing, your emotions, then if you're paid less.

Correct. Exactly. Now, I think obviously in the experiment, lying was an easy way to show the effect. But in real life, I think the way that you want to apply this is to say, all right, I've got to find something about this task that's interesting to me. And then in the process of explaining it to somebody else, I'm going to convince myself because I'm hearing the argument from somebody I already like and trust.

I've also chosen the reasons that I find compelling as opposed to hearing somebody else's reasons. And so I think this goes to the point that you were making, which is if you're trying to find a hook to make a topic intriguing, you've got to figure out, okay, what is it that would make this fascinating to me? And in a lot of cases, what you're looking for is a curiosity gap. I think social scientists like to talk about curiosity is an itch that you have to scratch.

So there's something you want to know and you don't know it yet. So I would say I tell my students often, take your least favorite class and find a mystery or a puzzle. Like something that you just do not know the answer to. I actually have talked with our kids about this. What really happened to King Tut? Do you know? Can you get to the bottom of that? And all of a sudden, I wonder. I need to Google it. And then I need to see if Wikipedia has credible information on this.

And the more you learn about that, the more intriguing it becomes. And I think that's the beginning of the process of finding intrinsic motivation. I see. So inherent in your answer is the idea that there's something wired into our neural circuits and therefore psychology that curiosity as a verb.

The act of being curious and seeking information where well, and I should say I define curiosity and hopefully you'll disagree with me or agree either way doesn't matter as long as we can get a bit deeper understanding. I define curiosity as a desire to find something out where you are not attached to a particular outcome. Yes. Is that right?

Yeah. I've been to colleges typically defined as just wanting to know. And that means you're driven by the question, not a particular answer, which is exactly what you're driving at. Okay. Great. So, and I think it was Dorothy Parker that said the cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity as there there shouldn't be a care for curiosity.

So, and by the way, folks, we don't know what neural circuits subserve curiosity in the brain. It's got to be a distributed network. There's no brain area for curiosity, but it's got to be linked up with the reward systems of dopamine, et cetera. In some way, because when one discovers something new that satisfies some curiosity, it's clearly there's a there's an internal reward there.

Okay. Let me back up. So, if your child or an adult is dreading working exploring a topic or going about an assignment of any kind, you will give them a question that they then need to resolve.

What if the assignment is like, rake the leaves off the front lawn? Do you say, you know, count the leaves or I mean, how does one get past the sort of procrastination and generate some intrinsic motivation for things that one dreads where it's unlikely that they're going to discover some knowledge that's exceedingly useful for the for future.

You always start with, okay, what's the first experiment I can run? Find the most interesting looking leaf for your favorite leaf and then that that lasts for about two minutes and, okay, now what, what's a lot of leaves there?

Right. I think not all tasks can be made intrinsically motivating to everyone. And so when intrinsic motivation is difficult to find what you want to substitute with is is a sense of purpose. Maybe a better way to say that is when the process is not interesting to you, you need to find a meaningful outcome.

So there's some research on the boring but important effect where kids who have a purpose for learning this goes through high school and think, you know, this is not just interesting to me, but I'm going to be able to use this knowledge to help other people one day.

They they're more persistent and they're studying they end up getting better grades. And so I think, you know, intrinsic motivation is often driven by curiosity about the how a sense of purpose comes from really thinking hard about the why why does this matter. And so I say with the, you know, the raking leaves, let's try to connect that task to something that else that you care about. Are you going to, you know, pleasantly surprise your parents when they get home?

Are you going to, you know, have a place to play soccer that you didn't before. And I think then the, you know, the process of getting to that. I guess what I'd say is if you're trying to motivate yourself, it's a little bit harder than if you're trying to motivate somebody else on this.

I would take a page out of the motivational interviewing playbook where I would say, okay, Andrew actually just plays that for a second. So you're going to raise a pile leaves. It's a two hour task zero to 10. How excited are you about that? A three three really. I'm surprised. I thought you're going to say zero or one. Why is it not lower? I like any sort of physical activity because it allows me to move and I just like moving my body.

There we go. Okay. So you just identified a potential source of purpose for that activity. And I don't have a, I don't have a vested interest in convincing you to do this task. I am genuinely curious about what would motivate you to want to do it. And as you start to articulate it, boom, self persuasion kicks in. Love it. I'm going to start using these, these approaches. Try to your own risk.

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You can spend the money that you make and you know, on your paper route, doing the things you really want to do. Is there any value in those kinds of learning based incentives for kids and for adults? Because I mean, that's the real world as well. I know plenty of people, I have family members that only work for a paycheck. And they're pretty okay because they like spending their paycheck. Probably more than I, you know, I'm not intrinsically attached to money.

I mean, I certainly have needs in life, but I don't enjoy spending money for the sake of spending it or for gaining more possessions. I know people that do and I certainly don't judge. Are they somehow existing in a diminished landscape of happiness? Because they seem pretty happy to me. But they seem to have also worked out this relationship. They do certain things to get the extrinsic rewards and they really enjoy what they can do with those extrinsic rewards.

So there's a huge body of evidence on what are the effects of extrinsic rewards on motivation and performance. And I think the latest conclusions, if you look at the latest meta-analysis, so huge study of studies trying to accumulate what's the average effect of adding a financial incentive to a task that wasn't incentivized before or to a job where you were paid salary, now we're going to give you incentive compensation.

There is a boost. So in general, people are more productive when they're incentivized for their output. But these incentives are better for motivating quantity than quality. So you see people get more done, but they're not necessarily more careful or more thorough. Are they less careful, unless they're thorough? No. Actually, they're still positive effects on average. They're just weaker. Of course, you could then start to say, well, how do I incentivize being fast and careful?

But I think where we do have to be really cautious is there's an undermining effective extrinsic rewards on intrinsic motivation. And you were you were alluding to this earlier dating back to the early 70s where we know that if we take an interesting task and then we pay you for it, you might conclude that you're only doing it for the outcome.

And you lose interest in the tasks of the the classic demonstration Mark Lepper and colleagues is kids playing video games. And they're they're playing them because they're fun. And then you start to add in an incentive. And then when the incentives taken away, they don't want to play anymore because the meaning of the task has changed. And now I'm doing it because I want to get something out of it as opposed to I love the process.

I think that that phenomenon does not have to exist. So we know, for example, at work, if managers, as long as they give people autonomy, they don't present the rewards in a controlling way. So instead of saying, you know, Andrew, in order to earn this, you need to do the following work.

If they say, hey, look, I really love it. If you, you know, if you would deliver the following, and in order to make that worth your while, I'm offering this incentive, people react very differently when they have a sense of choice and control. So I think that that's, I guess, the starting point in the presence of autonomy. I don't I don't think there's a major downside of of extrinsic rewards.

I think you also have to be careful that, yeah, I guess that you're not over justifying the task. In other words, you're not, you're not swamping people's intrinsic reason for doing it, but you're adding a reason to try it. So actually, if we, if we go to a different domain for a second, so look at kids who don't want to eat their vegetables.

Extrinsic incentives are very effective to get kids to try vegetables for the first time, but then the hope is that they discover a vegetable or two that they don't mind, and then they find reasons to keep doing it. And I think that that's how I want a lot of rewards to work. I don't think that rewards should be carrots that we dangle to try to control people's behavior.

I think they should be symbols of how much we appreciate and value a particular behavior. If you frame them that way, it's a lot easier for people to say, yeah, you know what? I'm that that reward is something that I really want, but I'm not only doing the task for that reward. Yeah, that you basically answered the question I was going to ask, which is and you know, risk of sounding new agey, but we are sitting in California.

I could imagine that when one is focused on the extra intrinsic rewards, so physical task or cognitive task for an extra intrinsic reward. If I'm focusing on the extra intrinsic reward, I'm also air quotes again, not present, right? I'm thinking about the outcome. I'm not thinking about process.

And I think there's perhaps you can flush out some of what this is exactly, but I think there's a fairly extensive data to support the idea that when we are physically and mentally present to the task that we're going to perform better and presumably are intrinsic liking of that task or performing that task increases as well. Is that true?

Yeah, I think so. I think so if we want to break down the mechanisms for why intrinsic motivation is useful for performance, one, you touched on earlier, it's focus of attention. It's much easier to find flow when you're intrinsically motivated. You get into that state of deep absorption where time melts away. So you mentioned, you know, sort of either speeding up or slowing down your sense of time.

You forget where you are. Sometimes you even lose track of your identity and you're just you're just merged into the task. And so that that that concentration is helpful. There's also a greater persistence effect that when you enjoy what you're doing, you're less likely to give up in the face of obstacles.

You're more likely to think about it when you're not doing the task and come up with great ideas. And so, you know, I think there's there's a working harder. There's a working longer. There's a working smarter and there's also thinking more clearly effect.

This is a brief but related tangent. One of the things that I found incredibly difficult in recent years is that, you know, most of my life, really since I was a small kid, I was forging for things. And then, you know, I used to give lectures on Monday in class if they let me until they eventually stopped me about the stuff I was reading about all weekend.

So down early start and the professorial front. But now, if I'm reading something and I discover what I think is a really valuable piece of information or a tool or a protocol like, wow, this is really cool. These findings are oh, so cool. There's a problem, which is that now I have an opportunity to cast that out to the world through social media. We all do. This could be.

I'm sorry, you're on social media. From time to time. I do what you're all over my feet. You and I both do our own social media, by the way, which I really appreciate. I think you one can always detect if someone else is handling someone's social media. So yes, I'm on social media. And I love that I have the opportunity to both send out ideas and information and also receive feedback.

I really love the comment section and always encourage comments. I learned from it, frankly, love is a strong word. I learned from it. And you and I were weaned in the academic culture where frankly, the kind of hazing that one receives an academic culture is very different than the kind of hazing that one receives on social media. But let's just say that if you come up through academia, you develop a pretty thick skin.

I agree that I do have to say though that there was a part of me that was really surprised when I started posting on social that I love I love constructive criticism. I was unprepared for the number of people who will knee jerk, criticize a study without even looking at whether the methods are rigorous.

If I posted this, surely it's at least worth considering the possibility that there's strong evidence behind it. Well, that's where a brief I want to call it a retweet, but a response of, you know, you know, clearly you should read the study further because I think you'll be satisfied with the answer or something. I don't know, but I agree it can be a little bit harsh in there sometimes, but you know, the social media channels are I think how you know they have it's a double edge blade.

They obviously have their issues, but can be a wonderful opportunity to share information and share it quickly. The problem is that it takes me out of what I was doing initially, which was learning searching for those gems with which to share later. And I think there's a broader landscape to consider this where people, for instance, are I was at the beach yesterday. It was just absolutely spectacular day at the beach, especially for this time of year.

And everyone was taking pictures of that experience on their phone and probably sharing that experience either social media or with friends. This is very different than taking a photograph and not seeing that photograph until later or not sending it out. And so there are now near infinite number of circumstances where we are taken out of the rewarding experience.

I should rephrase that we are taking ourselves out of the rewarding experience and focusing on a different rewarding experience that I think by definition is an extrinsic reward. So we are taking ourselves out of our intrinsically rewarding experiences and activating these extrinsic rewards. And do you think in any way that's undermining our experience of things that we really enjoy?

Again, not to demonize social media or these channels, but I've personally found it difficult to refrain from sharing this knowledge I'm so excited to share, but I deliberately delay. And there's a lot, I have a deep list of folders full of things that I want to post, but I'm just doing it systematically over time because I really fight the temptation to do this. Mostly because I want to continue to enjoy this learning process and this seeking process so much.

Yeah, I feel the same, the same, I feel torn. I think it was EB White who said, I rise in the morning, torn between the desire to enjoy the world and the desire to improve the world. And this makes it difficult to plan the day. And I feel that every day, I think, I mean, I even felt it this morning. I was like, okay, it's time to leave to come to the The Huberman podcast. I'm like, wait, but I didn't hit my minimum sunlight viewing.

So what do I do? Do I show up on time for you or do I meet your criteria? The explanation I was getting my morning sunlight and therefore I'm X number of minutes or even hours late would have been completely fine. I figured it was much. Yes, absolutely. That's a built in acceptable excuse with you. I think, I mean, I think everybody experiences a version of this and it's definitely gotten worse with social media and with smartphones.

And I think so what are the most startling data points for me was Gloria Mark first put this on my radar before COVID. The average person was checking email 72 times a day. How do you ever concentrate for more than a couple minutes if you're self interrupting that often? You can't. Brigitte Schulti has a great term for that she calls it time confetti. And she says, we're taking these meaningful blocks of time and we're slicing them up into these tiny little dots of confetti.

And not only can we not accomplish anything, we're also eroding our own sense of joy because it's really hard to enjoy the, you know, the 32nd blip of time that you get on a task. And I think we know a lot more about the existence of these problems than how to solve them. But one thing we do know is blocking out on an interrupted time is meaningful. There's a great Leslie Parlo experiment where she takes engineers and she has them. She sets a quiet time policy.

No interruptions Tuesday, Thursday, Friday before noon. 65% above average productivity. Could you repeat the protocol again? Yeah, so quite a time there are a couple iterations of it. But I think the most effective one was Tuesday, Thursday, Friday. No meetings, no interruptions, no slack, no emails before noon. And during those periods of no interruptions, one could tend to whatever their primary purpose is at work.

Yeah, you have a, for me, it might be podcasting. Obviously, I don't have my phone in here and never do. But it doesn't mean no interaction with anyone else. It just means focusing on the major task. It's asked exactly and you come in with a clear sense of priority and purpose. And I don't think there's anything magical about Tuesday, Thursday, Friday before noon. It's just the idea of setting a boundary and collectively committing to it that seems to be important.

And I think, you know, when I think about this, I'd be really curious about your take on chronotypes here. Because I think one thing I've learned in the last couple of years is that if you're a morning person, you do your best analytical and creative thinking in the morning. And so the quiet time block would work very well for me as a morning person. If you're a night owl, you probably want that block in the late afternoon.

And I was encouraged. There was some evidence during COVID that people have their best meetings right after lunch. That there something like 30% less likely to multitask in an after lunch meeting. And I guess, you know, you could probably unpack the, the food coma, you know, getting reenergized by other people.

It's led me to wonder if we should all be protecting the first few hours and the last few hours of the day for deep work and then doing our core meetings and interactions and kind of off task activities in the middle. What do you think about that as a sequence? Yeah, well, I have a lot of questions about this for you, but I love that sequence. It certainly fits with my natural rhythms.

I think there's ample evidence to support the fact that provided one is sleeping well at night and is on a more or less a standard schedule when I say standard, I mean going to bed somewhere between, let's say 930 and 1130 p.m. waking up sometime between, let's say, 6 a.m. and 8 a.m. maybe 537 30 something like that. So not highly unusual night out or super early bird. For people that are following that sort of schedule, the first, let's just say from 0 to 8 hours after waking.

There tends to be a fairly robust increase in all the catacolomene. So dopamine or epinephrine epinephrine, in which generally, OK, generally speaking, lead to increases in alertness attention and focus that are great for analytic work. Great for implementation of strategies that you already understand and you need to churn through a lot of stuff.

And of course, there's a big increase in the morning, especially if you view morning sunlight, a healthy increase, I should say in cortisol. Cortisol is not bad folks. You want cortisol, but you want that peak early in the day. We know that. OK, so for most people, it seems at least my understanding is that that period of time 0 to 8 or 8 hours after waking or so is best devoted to the quote unquote most critical tasks.

But one of the common problems is that people take that ability to implement a known strategy and they start battering back all the emails or talking to all by the way, talking to co workers is great and it's often required, but it's what the questions whether or not it's productive conversation or whether or not it's just conversation.

And we tend to have a lot of energy early in the day and I'm obsessed with the idea of neural energy as opposed to just caloric energy. So there we're talking about neural energy and then post lunch. So really as we get to this sort of you know nine to 17 hours after waking.

There is a dip in autonomic arousal that during the middle of the day that post perennial dip those post lunch sleepiness that can be partially offset by delaying your morning caffeine a bit if you have the afternoon crash, but it's interesting that you know that more productive meetings and less.

Test switching and distraction occurred in meetings after lunch because that makes me think that perhaps being a little bit less alert is going to lend itself to more focus and indeed that's the the sort of optimal state relaxed but focused you know you're not sleepy. But you also don't have so much intrinsic energy that you're you're not too much of things because I think a lot of people do feel that way you know and I'm drinking you know double espresso right now.

So I'm not going to be in the morning late morning and you know I can sit still but I think a certain zoom meetings how do I say this I don't want to offend any my colleagues I mean that they are boring enough. Spend some work to flip over those phones while I'm on a zoom and things like that.

So I'm thinking my understanding rather was that creative work and kind of brainstorming was best accomplished in the late afternoon. I've noticed when lecturing I'd be curious what your experiences with in university lectures when I held courses in the evening I used to like to hold my courses five to seven p.m.

when I was teaching undergraduates that people were much looser and more relaxed and I always thought that that might have something to do with an increase in GABA transmission that's known to happen late in late evening the people are just kind of more relaxed and less social anxiety they've been around people for much of the day.

I send back more reflections and answers I don't have any firm neuroscience explanations for what you described but there's some emerging theories about how it might work and it has this zero to nine hours. Phase one nine to 17 hours phase two and then of course from 17 to 24 hours. I'll call it phase three you should be asleep. Yeah ideally well that I think there's there's a there's a confound in your your teaching experience which is.

So there's a number of other grads often sleeping until what noon or they might be up until 4 a.m. Or at least 10 a.m. seems to be a typical rise time for the undergrad. So morning class might be too early for them to be fully awake but there is there's some brand new evidence that at least on creativity at work I read a series of I think it was three studies.

Recently showing that early birds actually did do more creative work in the morning and in part I think again I don't I don't think any neuroscientist has touched the mechanisms on this.

Yet but in terms of the psychological processes early on there's just there seems to be a benefit of of the energy level and some of that energy leads to more divergent thinking and later if you're a morning person you might lose the ability to to diverge quite as much and so you end up in a more conventional space of thought. Does that does that track it all with your understanding of how it might play out in the brain.

My understanding is to be a little bit in it would be individual but you know there is something to these liminal states between sleep and waking so maybe we can wrap a convenient bow around what I said in what you just said which is that we know that in the transition states into an out of sleep.

And it doesn't necessarily have to be within the first half hour in and out of sleep that there seems to be more divergent thinking or at least activation of neural networks that are not as constrained as one observes when they're in a in a sheer task and strategy implementation mode right I mean I think is that similar to the shower effect the shower effect so people have ideas in the shower or while running or while falling asleep or my best ideas always come within the first hour after waking that's why carry a notebook around and.

Which is the dismay of people in my life often times I don't want to hear or talk to anyone first thing in the morning this is problematic and I had to make adjustments we'll talk about adjustments between productivity and control and family interactions this is something I know you've worked on and written about but those liminal states are interesting and I'd love your thoughts on this i've had several guests on this podcast talk about their creative process.

Namely Rick Rubin famous for his work in music producing also has a great podcast to your gramaton as well as Carl Dyseroth the colleague of mine who's really in the point zero zero zero one percent of super talented bioengineers nor scientists who also happens to be a full time clinical psychiatrist and has five children.

Okay and I asked them about their creative process because both of them are very creative um Carl's process involves the following late at night for him but it could really be any time of day deliberately making his body as still as possible and forcing himself to think in complete sentences Rick's creative process although it includes a lot of different things has a lot to do with.

Also getting very still lying down okay other folks that I've spoken to academics and an artist have referred to getting their body into motion but quieting their mind so these are two opposite processes one case the body is still but the mind is deliberately very active in the other scenario the body is very active but they're making their mind sort of in free association not still but they're not deliberately thinking about any one thing.

And I'm obsessed with this maybe you and I could work on this you know I'm due for a sabbatical maybe we could figure this out because I never seen anyone study this before right because the the nervous system no the nervous system I'm not aware of anyone has done it formally either the nervous system of course is a is a brain body phenomenon and so what happens when we sort of cut off the deliberate operations of brain or body.

And it doesn't seem to matter whether or not it's brain or body as long as one is deliberately shut off and so anyway I love your thoughts on this I don't consider myself like a ultra creative or creative type. To any great degree but me neither but I'm fascinating right but I'm fastening by these deliberate tactics that highly creative people have have to undertaken in order to bring about ideas I certainly have some of my best ideas when I'm running.

And I'll just be running along my goodness I wasn't even thinking and I need to write this down okay and then continue I tried the Diceroth approach and the the Ruben approach actually just spent a week with Rick overseas and indeed he spends a lot of time just still thinking and it's a very hard practice to get to get consistent with.

I wonder I wonder if their individual differences here on which needs to be stable or steady I'm think you know I think about a huge part of creativity is is overriding your default instincts and if you're somebody whose default is to have your mind constantly going then quieting would probably shift your your train of thought to something more original or unconventional the opposite might be true if you have a naturally quiet mind I would imagine you need to you need to sort of.

Jolt yourself out of that with lots of access to you know to free ranging thoughts and so it would be interesting actually to study whether we can predict what you should still based on your personality. Yeah I want and maybe what we could do with that study I think we have a collaboration brewing you know there's a joke you know to to scientists walk into a room and what comes out as a collaboration so.

I want to put people in a scanner it's hard to get people tread milling in a scanner because the movement artifact but and just look at net resting network activation and compare that to resting network activation when people are completely still enforcing themselves to think and deliver it to the right sense and then look at the overlap in that then diagram that's what's of interest to me they may be completely different

from brain states they might actually have more similarity than differences I wonder then if you can tie that to differences in the quality and quantity of output so I would imagine that one of the benefits of either kind of movement is that you you end up increasing the volume of ideas which we know is good for variety and ultimately increases the probability that you stumble onto something new but then I think this being still part is probably better for the filtering process of I think one of the hardest parts of the world is that you know that you are going to be able to do that.

I think one of the hardest parts of creativity is actually judging your own ideas most most creative people have many terrible ideas in fact the most creative people have the most horrible ideas because they just have a lot of ideas and I think that maybe there's a there's a way in which quieting either your body or your mind allows you to gain some distance from the idea and see whether it's bone headed or promising.

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How do you cope with how does one cope with not placing a judge on that that causes some false negatives where you're wiping out great ideas because you know Rick Rubin talks a lot about you know don't give the audience what they want they don't know what they want they haven't seen it yet if it's a truly creative idea they haven't seen it.

But of course we all have to develop our own sense of taste so well how does this process work for you I mean you written about and worked on a tremendous range of topics and always I must say with it's such rigor and such clarity of communication about the topics yeah it's absolutely true I mean like 100% so we say around here no weak sauce you know and there's no weak sauce in your game it's incredible so

when do you get your ideas and how do you filter those ideas I feel like the when could be any time I think the I mean you've you've clearly experienced this to for me the best thing about hosting a podcast is I have an excuse to learn about anything I want from almost anyone I want and I get to call that part of my job and so I feel like you know that having that built in mechanism for learning means ideas could could comment any moment.

The filtering process for me is it's evolved over the last few years what I what I do now is if I'm letting I'm starting a new book all right a draft of the first chapter and I send it to five to eight people whose judgment I trust and by design some of those people are in my field they're you know deep seated in organizational psychology others are you know very far outside but curious about the topics I'm interested in and I asked them for zero to 10 score.

This is something I learned to do is a springboard diver where you know I would take off and you know I'm doing a few flips or twists and I think my dive is good but I can't see it because I'm hurling in mid air and it's everything's a blur and so I have to rely on my coach to tell me if it was any good I feel like creative work is the same way you're too close to it to know how the audience is going to react to it and yes you don't want to create it just for the audience but the end of the day you want it to be you know interesting or useful to them.

So I asked for the zero to 10 and no one ever says 10 and then I use that as a calibration mechanism so if everybody is in the seven or eight range I know that I'm onto something promising and now I need to refine it if I get a bunch of twos three three and a half's either need to rethink the idea or dramatically rewrite how I'm positioning it and I think one of the mistakes a lot of people make is they know they need feedback on their ideas.

They go to one or two people and they start to feel a little bit defensive or threatened and their ego gets involved and then they don't ask for any more what they don't realize is it's actually less painful if you get more feedback.

Because when eight different people critique your work you start to realize that a few of the comments that sort of bruise you a little bit we're just idiosyncratic and no one else cared about those issues but then five people had the same problem like that is not taste that is a quality it's not a good thing.

So what is a quality issue and I've got to focus on that and so it really helps to filter what are the what are the revisions I need to make what are the problems and complaints I need to pay attention to versus what can I ignore because maybe this product was not for that person. I'm recalling when I was a postdoc I had a manuscript fully prepared and I worked in a laboratory where I didn't work on the same thing as my postdoc advisor he was very gracious and letting me be the outlier.

He said well I don't know anything about this topic so before you submit it to this fairly prestigious very frankly very prestigious journal I'll be honest you should probably go down the hall and hand it to someone so I don't want to do what's because I'm still in the same department. And I gave it to him this individual and he looked at me said yeah you know it looks interesting but I don't think there's going to be a whole lot of interest in this it's just like not.

I was like no way like this I think this is really cool but I was pretty dismayed so I was like how I got so what do I do so I went back to my advisor and thankfully he's a bit of an icon of class and he said that's the best feedback you could have gotten definitely submitted to that particular journal and I must say that paper got accepted faster than any other paper I've never had an experience like that I mean it required some revisions I remember thinking like wow what an unusual response to after having instructor me to go ask a.

A more senior colleague raise of that time assistant professor and then to get the neck essentially negative response and then to take that as like you should definitely send it out really taught me a lesson that sometimes one needs to invert their. Their action according to the negative feedback they get not always but that was an end of one okay so it's not shouldn't be extrapolated to too many circumstances but basically led me to not seek out feedback.

I mean I check information obviously prior to podcast I check the validity of the information and podcasts and papers but it made me realize that people's opinions can be like highly idiosyncratic and in some cases outright wrong and really the the opinion of the journals what what mattered most in terms of getting it accepted or not so how do you you said give it to the greatest number of people but if it's any of the

like comments on social media there's a salience to negative comments so how should we filter positive versus negative feedback well there's a there's a meta analysis here this is cluger and Denise looking at a hundred years of feedback research and they found that what drives the utility of feedback is not whether it's positive or negative it's

whether it focuses on the task or on the self so if I tell you that your work is terrible you're going to get defensive if I tell you that your work is great you're going to get complacent if I tell you here's the specific thing that I liked about your work you're going to try to learn to repeat that and if I tell you here's the thing I didn't like you're going to try to see if you can fix it.

So I actually think we should worry less about whether the feedback is encouraging or discouraging and more about how do I make sure that I get input that's going to allow me to learn from my strengths and also overcome my weaknesses and actually I one of the things I've learned recently is there's some I would say growing body of evidence at this point that asking for feedback is not the best way to get people to help you

because when you ask for feedback you end up getting two groups of people you get cheerleaders and you get critics and cheerleaders are basically applauding your best self critics are attacking your yourself what you want is a coach which is somebody who helps you become a better version of yourself and the way you get people to coach you is not to say give me feedback because they will then look at the past and tell you what you screwed up or what you did

right what you want is to say can you give me advice for next time and then they look at the future and they'll give you either a note on something to repeat or something to correct and this is such a subtle shift that it can make a big difference.

Andrew one of the things I guess I found myself applying this to a lot is after giving speeches I used to get off stage and say I would love some feedback and you get back a bunch of oh you know I really enjoyed that thanks what do I do with that information I'm trying to learn how to get better and when I shift the question to say what's the one thing I could do better next time. Oh don't open with the joke the audience can tell you are joking.

Frequently it's give me a little bit more of a through line you focused a lot on you know a bunch of interesting points but I lost the connective tissue. And you know those actionable suggestions are much more likely to come when you just ask for a tip as opposed to an evaluation. That's so good I think I'm going to just pause for a second. I've never taken a pause. I've taken occasional pause to be honest but they're very rare as the audience knows.

So that's just gazillion dollar advice because I think that everyone has an ego we all want to perform well we'd like to perform better over time and negative feedback hurts and it can hurt a little or a lot depending on how defensive we are but a tool like you just described to remove some of that defensive armor that we all have and actually let the information in in a way that's constructive.

It's really great what you described I think is a way to create constructive criticism but the constructive part is really coming from within as opposed to saying I'd like some constructive criticism and then hoping that the criticism is actually constructive so you're taking control over the process in a healthy way in a benevolent way.

So that's the goal and I think the big question that comes up for a lot of people at this point is okay so I get somebody to give me advice but it might still sting how do I get better at taking it constructively. And I think probably my favorite technique on this I learned from Sheila Keen she calls it the second score and the idea is that when somebody gives you a piece of criticism that's your first score so let's say you know they.

I in my in my world they gave me a three and a half and I want to know how I can do better next time how do I get myself to focus on that what I do is say I want to get a 10 for how well I took the three and a half and that's the second score I want to evaluate myself on how well I took the first score.

I think about this almost every day there was actually I tell you a quick story so when I was right out of my doctorate I got asked to teach a motivation class for Air Force generals and kernels I was 25 I think 25 26 you know they're they're all twice my age they've got thousands of flying hours they've got billion dollar budgets they've got well you know this community well there's a lot of people.

I know this community well their nicknames striker and sand dune and I was extremely intimidated so I walked in there and I thought I had to impress them and I started talking about my credentials and all my research experience and the feedback at the end of the four hour session was brutal I remember reading the feedback forms and one person had written more knowledge in the audience than on the podium.

True I can't argue with that and then another route I gain nothing from this session but I trust the instructor gain useful insight and that that was devastating. I was like can I I would really like to transform into an actual bear and hibernate for the next four months and then maybe I'll come out of a hole ready to hear this.

I had committed to teach a second session a week later so all I could do is figure out how am I going to hear this feedback and really take it seriously and I guess I applied a version of the second score and I said all right there's some generals that are going to come back and see me again and I've got to prove to them that I was open to feedback.

And one of the things I heard loud and clear was that they valued humility and I had led with too much confidence which was just insecurity masked and so I thought okay how do I how do I change the equation and walked in looked at the room and I said I know what you're all thinking right now what can I possibly learn from a professor who's 12 years old dead silence.

I know this is going to be horribly wrong and then one of the guys in the audience jumps in and he's like that's ridiculous you got to me at least 13.

Everybody started laughing it broke the ice and I think what I was trying to do was to take myself off the pedestal and say look I heard your feedback you told me that you didn't think I had anything to teach you and I've got to acknowledge that right up front and be open to the fact that's true and so I want to come in here and learn from you and I want to see if I can carry a conversation

where we all end up learning and the feedback was night and day different afterward I won one person wrote although junior and experience the professor dealt with the evidence in an interesting way. All right I'll take it and there's something really powerful about about saying look I can't change the fact that they hated my session what I can do is convince them that I was motivated to learn from their criticism.

I love this concept of the second score and thank you for sharing that story I think you know very often we hear about people like you who if people didn't catch the math in their your PhD by age 25. And as far as I know the youngest tender professor pen at 28 so these are outrageous outrageously impressive metrics of accomplishment but for you to share a story about a you know less than optimal performance and how you adjusted to it and and the incorporation of the second score.

I think that you're referring to I think is it is really appreciated because I think that as much as we hear you know oh you know Jordan you know took many more you know free throws and everyone just thinks about all the ones he made you know people think about all the ones he made.

That's the way the game works that's the way the mind works I should say so it's I appreciate that you flush it out with a with a personal example I too would want to turn into a bear and disappear but I would but I think that it's really impressive what you did and I and it makes me think that the second score of getting a.

At bringing the three and a half up right as it were is really about turning a score into a verb process you know over and over again as I do this podcast and as I've taught in the classroom when I keep coming back to this idea that we should be focusing more on verbs and less on nouns we love to name things and categorize them but but when we start living life through a lot of verb processes so instead of getting being fit.

We think about that you know or running as a thing we really think about like just running right it becomes less daunting and we accomplish for more but the idea that I'm you know this is this their mathematical models of this I'm sure but you're basically talking about you know like an integral right as opposed to just some value right you're talking about the slope of the line yeah right so you're three and a half.

How are you going to get to a 10 gosh that's a huge gap and you're dealing with back on your heels psychologically from getting all this you know battering feedback from these you know these highly accomplished individuals all these are you know literally wearing them presumably on their body so you to see and and it's really about creating it's about taking control the slope of that line from the three onward and it's really a forward looking perspective so I don't think we're being on and do the psychological here analytic I mean I think it's really good.

I mean I think it's really about taking a moment state and a noun and turning it into a verb yeah I think that's right I'm kind of a great philosopher Homer Simpson who said that verbing weird language so it's hard to talk about stuff in verse I swear I didn't steal it from the Simpsons but if it came from Homer Simpson like I'm all for you. You have to I mean that's small brain small brain but you know given the size of his brain and people have seen the image.

You know fairly fairly robust knowledge. No I think I think you're onto something I think verbs are active and we're drawn to them I think yeah a lot of times people review their past work and they just like they end up shaming an earlier version of themselves and they they wallow in rumination and what we want to try to do in that situation

which is easier said than done is say all right like the purpose of you know of getting feedback or advice is not to shame my past self is to educate my future self. Which I think is very connected to a lot of the work on growth mindset that you've been talking about and there's been a firestorm of controversy around can we teach growth mindset in schools lately and I think what that is underscored for me is like you can't you can't expect someone to listen to one podcast

or go through one workshop and magically believe that they're capable of learning anything at any moment this is something we have to actively work on on a daily basis and part of doing that exactly as you said is thinking about this lip and saying all right the person that I'm you know I'm competing with is my past self and I want to go a little bit better today than I was yesterday.

Yeah I think along the lines of growth mindset obviously we both know Carol Dweck and respect her tremendously and I I realized there is some controversy now around how you know readily one can teach growth mindset or incorporate growth mindset my understanding and I love to know your thoughts on this is that when the Dweck work is combined with some of the alley crumb work that is growth mindset is combined with a knowledge just a

basic and true understanding that stress and the feelings of anxiety and tension that can actually be performance enhancing when those two things are combined I think this is the work of David Yeager and colleagues at UT Austin that indeed growth mindset becomes more visible in our mindsets and performance and are there other aspects to growth mindset and other mindsets that are now being woven into that framework that that can be helpful because I know gosh if ever there was a great name for a

area of psychology growth mindset tells you everything you want everything you need and everything you sort of need to know and just the name but we all find it difficult to implement just telling myself I'm not as good as something that could be yet it sounds great but in moments of you know receiving feedback that's harsh sometimes it's hard to access yeah it is I think so the latest there's a McNamara at all meta analysis and then you know I think

sort of that camp versus the the Carol and David camp you have very different views on how big the effects are but I think one thing they they seem to agree on is growth mindset is more important in circumstances where people are more likely to need it so if you think about for example kids who are

impoverished or marginalized communities you know the message that you actually you know that you you are capable of you know of evolving your skills to the point that something you're bad at today you could be good at next year is really important when you never heard that before and when you don't have a single person believing in you I think where where we're often missing the boat is we think all right I'm just going to I'm

to instill this idea in a person's head and my work is done and we know that the context around you really matters so actually Carol's done some research showing that growth mindset is more likely to have an impact when your classroom culture also and your teacher has the belief that kids are capable of growing that you're you know you're starting ability is not fixed in any subject and I think we probably for all of us as individuals what that means is we need to think about the the

micro environment that we put ourselves in I think you know the because one of the things I think a lot about lately is scaffolding and the idea that you know when you're when you're trying to improve something you don't need a permanent teacher necessarily you don't need one mentor you know guiding you for nine years what you need is somebody who can give you the

temporary support that allows you to to scale to a new height just like a scaffold would on a building and in learning theory basically the idea behind scaffolding is we're going to initially give you the support you need to solve a problem and then we're going to slowly remove the support so that you learn to do it on your own

and I think that those those kinds of scaffolds are often missing so we instilled the growth mindset like I've got this belief in my head but I don't know what I need to do to you know to put that belief into action and that's where I guess that that to me is we have to go beyond mindset we have to think about how do we put people in a context that allows them to put their beliefs into practice

you are asking me what else do we need to support growth mindset and make it effective right yeah I mean we know people learn what growth mindset is it's the idea that you're not as good as something yet okay terrific but it's very hard to implement in real time there are I have to presume additional tools that one can bolster the growth mindset with make it make it more accessible and benefit from it.

Yes so Justin Berg and Amy Resnaskin I study this actually we did we were looking at growth mindset at work and Justin's well he's a stand for I don't know if you met him yet.

I have not but big place yes I figured we all know the sooner if that brilliant creativity researcher and Amy just joined us at Wharton and has fundamentally changed the way that I think about ideas in the way that she studied how we can shape our context and just on path-breaking work there and we we were interested in growth mindset and we we designed an intervention where people could learn growth mindset at work.

So we taught them to think about how their skills were malleable how they can stretch their knowledge into new areas and we found that teaching them that was not enough to boost their happiness or their performance. What we needed to also do was give them a growth mindset not just about themselves but also about their jobs.

In other words to teach them that your job is a set of flexible building blocks that you've got a whole bunch of tasks that make up your job some of those are you know are things to do others are might be interactions that you need to have. And if you break down your your job into all these tests you might have some tests that you want to accentuate and make a bigger part of your job others that you want to try to subtract others that you might swap with a colleague.

And a lot of people it turns out think their jobs are fixed by their job descriptions but in fact you have a ton of opportunity to say wait a minute you know there's something I there's a strength I have but I'm not using it right now is there a way we can bring that into my work.

And so in these couple experiments we did when we randomly assigned people to learn both at their jobs were malleable and that their skills were malleable they got a sustainable boost to their happiness that what lasted at least six months there was no cost to their performance meaning you could to redesign your own job to be more enjoyable without without a drop in the effectiveness of your contributions to your workplace.

And I think what I came away from that research realizing is it's not enough to just say well I can get better I can improve because very often you feel like your your environment is limited. Great yeah I can grow but I'm stuck in a dead and job and so what we need to do there is open up the opportunity for people to to to innovate on their own job description and then growth mindset can begin to to have an impact.

But it sounds a bit like adding a S to growth growth mindset so it's not growth mindset it's growth mindsets because earlier you mentioned that in the classroom environment if the teacher adopts a growth mindset.

Yes as well as the students well then you have a culture of growth mindset so it's the interconnectedness of this and the context in which the individuals growth mindset exists do I have that right well put yeah we ended up calling it dual mindset but I think making it a plural is good because you know

it's not I have this image of you know you put a person in a in a cage and then tell them they're capable of growing still stuck in a cage and so we need to we need to give them a chance to to bust through those walls.

Super important I hate to take us back to an earlier topic but there's something that I meant to ask you that I didn't and I'm absolutely needing to ask you which is your recent work or recent ish work as a few years back now and you're so prolific that I have to call it a few years back.

The relationship between intrinsic motivation and performance on other tasks yeah and the reason I asked this several fold I did two episodes of the podcast on ADHD and one of the things that I learned in talking to experts on ADHD people with ADHD as well as looking at some of the novel treatments everything from behavioral to prescription drug to even nutrition based was that kids and adults.

With clinically diagnosed ADHD are actually terrific at paying attention to things that they really enjoy or that they're super interested in so clearly they have the capacity is just that they have deficits if you will in attending the things that are less exciting to them less intriguing to them.

So if I recall correctly you have a publication that explored the relationship between intrinsic motivation and performance in other stuff yeah and one of the major conclusions was that having a deep deep interest in one thing might not be the best condition for performing well at other less interesting task could you could you tell us about that study what what motivated you to carry out that study and what some of the major takeaways were yeah definitely.

You summarize it really well I think the original impetus so this was another project with G hash in and G had came to me wanted to study intrinsic motivation and we were talking about what do we know about intrinsic motivation and what are the gaps in our knowledge and one thing that has always bothered me is when psychologist study something that sounds positive and they only study the benefits of it like there's no such thing as an unmitigated good all all sort of enjoyable experiences have costs.

All unpleasant experiences can have benefits we need to fill out this to buy to you of good thing bad thing good outcome bad outcome and so my challenge to her was can you show me the dark side of intrinsic motivation and she came back and she said what if there's a cost of loving a task leading you to hate a task that you don't like even more than you did before.

It's like oh that's an interesting idea tracks with the basic psychology of contrast effects where you know if you eat something delicious then you're least favorite food tastes a little bit worse afterward and so let's study this so she ended up getting data from from people at work and then we also design an experiment sure enough the more passionate you are and task one the more your performance offers if task to is really boring.

And I guess what what this did for me is it made me think differently about task sequencing I used to wake up in the morning and do my most interesting task first and then the grading was hell. And when I do now is I start with a moderately interesting task it's a little bit of warm up for me and then I have an exciting one to look forward to and if I do have a task that's boring but important I think the performance is going to suffer less.

Interesting and normally don't ask about morning routines and how one structure today because it's highly individual. Yeah and it depends on whether or not people have kids and their pets and you know what other but I'll just share with you a brief anecdote I have a friend who's a very accomplished musician it has been for several decades now and he told me that he has a practice of after he gets off stage and he's like stadium stadium sell out level.

Musician has been for a long time and shows no signs of stopping just incredible but a very down to earth person and he said one of the first things he does when he gets off stage is to go do some menial task I thought there's no way that's true but I've known his wife since college and she she verified that statement.

What's the mean task you're talking about is like cleaning up some of the cans and things that are there maybe even cleaning a toilet at a venue and I thought no chance but it turns out to be true and I said what's this about is about humility said well maybe a little bit but he said it actually makes it a lot easier for him to return home and deal with the kind of little things that just are out of scale with the experiences that he just had is tapering.

I think yeah yeah I first of all I was so struck by the fact that he had created this process for himself so long ago and he's also somebody who's you know he's maintained.

He's like been the same marriage for extremely long time he's extremely happy in that as family I mean see one of these people that seems to thrive in all domains of life and I'm certain that he struggles in some domain of life because everybody does but it sounds to me like a very unusual practice but it seems to kind of relate to this that you know he has this thing that he loves.

Playing music and performing in particular and he's just you know 0.01% at doing that and just like bring himself back down to earth because so much of life and especially family life is like dealing with the the schmutz and the inconvenience of everyday life.

Yeah it's it's actually sounds like what he's doing is he's resetting his frame of reference to say if you know if I go right home then the contrast between this high octane experience I'm having and sort of muddling through everyday life is going to be extreme if I do something really small then family time is going to seem a lot bigger.

Yeah so I realize I'm taking a bit of a leap from your study on intrinsic motivation and and low performance in in other domains but you know to me cleaning up clean a toilet is you know it's it's it's boring for all the wrong reasons right. As you say not one that would be an exciting question.

No and listen I mean if I had to do it for a living I would here I didn't I would try and do as well as possible and but right so well I found that say to be particularly interesting because I think that these days we we glorify high performance even quote unquote peak performance something we can talk about and we forget that yes oftentimes people who are ultra high performers can afford to pay other people to do all the other stuff.

I have to say in knowing some ultra high performers and in knowing some people in the billionaire bracket you know there's a high incidence of mental health issues frankly and lack of satisfaction with life that maybe even comes from not having to do anything besides the things that you find most intrinsically rewarding.

We all think that if I could I would spend all day doing the things that I find most intrinsically rewarding but maybe there's something about this push pull we know the brain works and push pull almost everything that having some experiences each day that are kind of like this thing again do you think that heightens our level of satisfaction for the things we really enjoy.

I would be surprised if it didn't I think I think contrast effects are very powerful and we know I mean the there's half a century of research on happiness suggesting that the comparisons we make are what matter. I think Tim urban probably put it best when he said happiness is reality minus expectations.

So it doesn't matter how good your reality is you wanted it to be better and better I think one of the things that mundane experiences manage to do for us or maybe a better way to say it is he wanted to benefit some mundane experiences is they keep our expectations on the ground and allow us to be pleasantly surprised by you know a task that was more interesting that we expected even though we didn't love it.

What are your thoughts on what I call momentum which is when I have an experience I particularly like like if we record a podcast and really excited to get it out into the world or if I have some experience that I'm left you know very excited by at the end that oftentimes the energy again I'm obsessed with this concept of neural energy the energy that I glean from that experience seems to carry over into other things you know you can be much more excited is go across the street and get a couple of calls.

I can get a couple of coffee feels like a bigger thing than normally would and I would think that one could kind of ride the wake of a of a prior accomplishment even a small accomplishment each day and make the you know tidying up or doing things that one would normally find more boring less boring is that true the way you're describing contrast effects makes it seem like that's more of a cliff like that thing was great and now this thing but I also kind of ride high on something that happened two three days ago maybe even two three months ago.

If so feeling good equates to feeling good or feeling good accentuates the bad stuff this is the tension between contrast and spillover and you can see both under different conditions I think where this is I think this is a brand new sort of I don't think anybody is reconciled those two perspectives yet but my hunch from having worked on the contrast part of it is we found that it was only extreme intrinsic motivation that had the performance cost on other tasks.

So if you're if you're enjoying something if you like it that will give you a lift for other tests it's where this is the best thing you've ever done and now other things suck by comparison that's where we start to see run into a problem I also wonder if there's a domain switching effect here I think you're you're alluding to this I read some research that just came out this year showing that one of the benefits one of the surprising benefits of morning workouts is you actually.

Have more confidence in your job because you get that small win I accomplished something this morning and that gives you a sense of efficacy that you can carry over into your you're the start of your work day not to suggest that everyone should work out in the morning because I'm with you I think everybody should both work and work out at a time that works for them.

But I think I think there's something to be said for something went really well in one realm of my life and that boost my belief in my capability to tackle challenges in a different realm. What about in the opposite direction you were a competitive diver I have to presume that there were days when you had lousy dies it must have been that one day.

And then you leave you know you you shower up dry off head head into the rest of your day and you know how do we segment away from the you know negative thought spirals of like something went really poorly and now you're off into the domain of life where you can do you know how to do the things that you're required to do but maybe there's some challenge and some learning involved how do we cut moats between negative experiences.

I think I mean the Ted Lasso strategy is ideal become a goldfish 10 second memory and you don't even you don't even recall the practice you had earlier today I think that I don't know anybody who can do that consistently and I think the more disappointing the experiences the more you tend to to dwell on it. I think when you talk about segmenting negative experiences I think the probably the research that I've liked best on this and I just want to make sure I capture this clearly.

I basically so research on emotion regulation says there are two strategies that tend to be effective one is distraction the others reframing. So distraction is you know find something else that will consume your attention that's unrelated to the thing that you just bomb that and the hope is that you know that that fades into the background reframing is a lot of what you were talking about a few minutes ago which is okay let me focus you know not on the level of my performance but the slope.

My diving coach Eric best has a really great set of questions that he he asks and you know I remember I would finish practice is a terrible day I just feel like I'm worthless as a diver and now diving was a big part of my identity I'm going to let my team now now I'm a bad teammate to my coaches wasting his time and now you know I he could have been you know training somebody much better like why am I doing this.

And Eric would ask did you make yourself better today and even if it was a bad practice there is something that improved yes okay and sometimes the answer feels like no and then he would ask did you make someone else better today.

Yeah I gave a little tip to a teammate you know I made a joke that you know that made everybody laugh and he was like great then it wasn't a bad day and I think this is this is an example of what good reframing looks like to say okay the goal wasn't to be great it was to be better the goal wasn't necessarily just to make myself better it was also to make other people better. And I think those are the kinds of questions that seem to segment pretty well.

Feedback because I think we all get stuck in those thoughts spirals and again not to demonize smartphones because they are wonderful tools but I have to remember the time I'm 48 years old as of tomorrow and I have to remember a time in which negative stuff was probably happening in the background but I didn't hear about it because no one was texting it to me so I find out at the end of the day when I still had time to do other things.

That said I would also get negative experiences early in the day and then carry them throughout the entire day when nowadays you can get a positive text message that says okay it wasn't so bad or something like that but I do think as is probably becoming apparent about these channels of communication are either boons or disruptions to our positive psychology is clear that we're just like being bombarded all the time.

So just as a practical question what is your relationship to your phone do you set boundaries around your phone use where the types of communications and activities that you engage on your phone. So I think everyone I know has to do list I also have it to don't list and on my to don't list includes I don't scroll on social media and I don't pick up my phone past 9pm and those those two habits are enormously helpful particularly the not scrolling.

I pick up my phone when I have something to post or when I want to see what the comments are and then see if there's something interesting to learn or somebody that I want to respond to and that that becomes a really healthy boundary because I don't get stuck in one of these rabbit holes where all of a sudden two hours of compine I feel like I feel like a waste in my time.

Where do you post or keep your to do and your to don't list do you keep them on your phone no it's a word document on my computer okay so you're still at the computer screen quite a bit each day yeah okay I feel like that's where most of my good thinking and writing happens. Yeah I carry a small notebook around with me now and write things down I was just curious so what are these yeah well like one of those yeah yeah try not to take notes on my phone ever.

Right yeah it can be problematic for me especially with with voice recognition now because you just it's hard to go back to that and then systematic way for me but I'm a big believer in these these things that for those listening and not watching I'm holding up a pen so I punch those work too. You've probably read some of the research also showing that you have a better memory for information when you take notes by hand than by keyboard.

I didn't know that but I'm very very gratified to hear that so the and I suppose if you don't have a pen and you don't have a pencil handy then you know blood always works just kidding I'm just getting don't don't don't make yourself for anyone else bleed just to get an idea down.

But it is amazing how sometimes we will have ideas while running walking showering out and about and then later try and recall those ideas and write them down they're gone the great show strummer from the clash talked about the critical importance of carrying around a small notebook such as you did because he said.

That the ideas fall down like rain and if you catch them there there but if you miss them they truly won't be there later and that's there's something kind of eerie about that like why wouldn't we be able to remember these potential gems of ideas.

All right the the guys are in up of the mind we had a guest on this podcast for a series Dr. Paul Conti psychiatrist and he talked extensively about the unconscious mind I mentioned this a little earlier but one of the things that really stuck with me as he said you know everyone

thinks that the prefrontal cortex and the frontal cortex is the super computer of the human brain sets context planning strategy switching etc etc certainly it's valuable real estate to our intellect and all our abilities but he said you know that the real super computer is the unconscious mind however that unconscious mind that lives below the surface of our awareness is also what drives a lot of our unconscious defenses so our so called blind spots.

Projection project of identification you know these can be both good or bad they can serve us well or poorly and so on and so forth but implied in this notion of the unconscious and blind spots is that we can't become aware of things unless we either do dedicated work to become aware of them or even better would be dedicated work where we are asking other people to say hey listen you have a blind spot and it is blank blank and blank so

tell us about the role of blind spots maybe some positive aspects of having blind spots but more importantly what we can do to fill in those blind spots and and perhaps also explain how they can limit us and if you have any examples that from the research where people overcoming their blind spots has been benefited them that would be amazing yeah wow there's a lot there let me let me start by saying I think a lot of people think about blind spots in terms of the

blind spots in terms of heuristics and biases so you think about confirmation bias you think about the classic conumin toversky work that ended up winning Danny and Nobel Prize on you know the way in which you know we are intuitive judgements often get anchored in the way we've done things before or you know we focus on the information that's

really not necessarily an available to us and overlook less obvious information I've come to think that the mother of all biases is what I think of is that I'm not bias bias it's technically called the bias blind spot in Emily Proud and then colleagues research but the idea is that I think I'm more objective than other people and you may have your you may have flaws in your thinking Andrew but me I see things clearly and rationally

and I think that this is a it's a really dangerous meta bias because the moment you believe you're not bias you are incapable of seeing any of your biases so in some of the research on the bias blind spot you see that that people who have who score high in cognitive ability test so you know high IQ are actually more likely to fall victim to the I'm not bias bias because they've been reinforced for a lifetime that they're really smart and they're good at thinking

goodness this explains some we don't talk about current events on this podcast much but this explains some current events people that were told their entire careers that they are perfect or near perfect and yeah circumstances eventually came to you know slam them hard into the concrete on that one or or in some cases it hasn't happened yet but we watch them

hurtling toward earth so I worry a lot about that so I think the beginning of you know of seeing any blind spot is recognizing that we all have blind spots as part of being human I think that the brighter side of that is that we're not just blind to weaknesses we're also blind to our strengths so Jane Dutton and Laura Morgan Roberts and colleagues did some research on the reflected best self portrait this is one of my favorite exercises to do in the classroom

but also to do in workplaces sometimes even people end up doing it with their kids at home the idea is that you do have strengths that you're not that aware of they may be things that come naturally to you that you don't even realize our hard for other people they may be things that are struggles for you and so you you think it's hard to do and therefore I'm bad at it but other people watch you do it and realize you're actually quite good at it

so the you need other people to hold up a mirror to see what these invisible strengths are so the way they reflect the best self portrait so the way they reflect the best self exercise works is you're asked to contact 10 to 20 people who know you well in different walks of life

might be a family member a couple friends some colleagues and then you ask them to tell a story about a time when you are at your best and you collect these stories it's it's the most exciting week of email you will ever get 20 now so let me tell you how great you are

but what's key this goes back to our discussion of feedback earlier is they're really specific about a moment when you are at your best and your job is to collect all the stories and do the pattern recognition exercise and ask what are the common themes that I've seen through these stories and it's a it's a really powerful and vivid way of getting a sense of what are those strengths and you know it's not surprising that in some of the research when people go through this process

they end up with much more clarity not only about what they're what they're good at and where they're potential lies but also how do I what are those situations haven't common where I was able to use my strengths and how do I get myself in those situations more often how do I create those situations more often

I'll give you a personal example on this so I got a bunch of feedback that I was good at helping other people see their strengths and I thought okay I don't feel like I have enough opportunity to use that strength in my daily life so what am I going to do about this and I ended up flipping the exercise upside down and I picked a hundred people who really mattered to me and I wrote a story to each of them about a time when they were at their best

and there's no reason I can't I can't make this part of my day it's probably it was probably one of the best weeks of my life it was better than getting the stories was was giving them and I got these notes back from people saying you know I didn't realize I don't even remember that thing that happened but I think for me was an example of saying okay you know I've always enjoyed trying to bring out the best in others

I don't feel like at the time I was a I was a first year doctoral student I didn't feel like I had anything to contribute to others I'm trying to learn how to you know understand this field and you know do a worthwhile study and write a paper

I'm not teaching yet I have no value to add and getting this feedback like oh you're somebody who helps other people see their potential I like all right let me let me take some people that I you know I already recognize really amazing things in and let me just tell them that and it took me about a week to write the the hundred emails and I can't think of a week I've spent better wow it's so interesting that you flipped the process on its head a bit or a lot and that ended up being the reward

do you think you learned anything about given that it was early in your academic career do you think you learned anything about your particular talent or desire to do what you do now I mean so much of what you described it seems to map well to what you do now I mean you could be if you were to choose or have chosen just not just but a laboratory scientist doing experiments you're clearly still doing that with a tremendous productivity

but you've also decided to tell the world about the information that you're gathering and the work of a lot of other people as well I guess I feel a kinship here because we both do this much much more interesting to say to other people's work than talk about what you already know it is indeed and it's fun to be able to weave ones understanding of the process into you know what like what are other people doing and know how hard it is to do it really good experiments

and be able to spot really good experiments but did you learn in that early stage of your career that like I think I want to do this later because what you do now is it maps pretty well on to what you just described I don't think it was it wasn't crystallized at the time

but it was definitely one of those seeds that was planted that that must have grown because I remember right after I got tenure a wonderful colleague of mine asked if I would write a book with him I was so flattered and I went in to talk to my undergrad

research lab later that day and I you know I mentioned offhand I was like hey and you know I got this invite I'm going to write this book and they freaked out no you cannot write somebody else's book you have to write about your ideas first if you're going to write a book write your own book and I was very resistant because I love other people's ideas I feel like what I do best I think it was boy A who wrote about the scholarship of discovery versus the scholarship of integration

and I never felt like I was a Urika you know blindingly you know original insight person I felt like what I was good at was synthesizing ideas and you know kind of taking a bunch of you know pieces of cloth and and sewing them into a quilt and allowing people to see the big picture in a way they hadn't before and I felt like I could do that with a colleague who was already a successful author and my students basically held me hostage

and I said you've been doing this research for for over a decade now and you have a responsibility to share that outside your classroom and it reminded me of of that experience of saying okay there's something I see in other people I want to share it with them

and maybe I could do that on a broader scale so yeah I think there was there were definitely dots that connected there when I was a master student at Berkeley there was a guy who's now moved to Michigan State Mark Breedlove who I hope to host on the podcast actually it's this really interesting does really interesting work on the biology of sexual differentiation and I think that's an invite if you're listening

yeah right and he it is indeed and he said to me he said you know review articles provided they are written by people who are credentialed in a given field are cited at you know a hundred X anyone particular paper now at the time I wasn't interested in impact factors in fact I've never paid any attention to impact factors they they're importance varies in different countries and in the US they play some role more so in Europe but I could care less about impact factor frankly

because those those metrics are what's going to carry you through the difficulty of designing and carrying out a hard experiment you have to be intrinsically and curious about the answer right you know this and I know this but but he basically said what something that's really supports your point which is that ultimately the ability of synthesize information is can feel really good and he started talking about the the feeling that he got from doing that

he's also a tremendous bench scientist as well in any event I'm so glad that you flipped that exercise on its head because now the world gets to benefit from you doing that for us all the time because I realize now that much of what you do is to help people identify and erase their blind spots

by and I love your social media channels and I noted on Instagram and I do scroll but I scroll through into your your channel to you know you'll put up in short form content that that really highlights the key importance of people embarking on strategies that they wouldn't reflexively take

that I see that over and over again it's like we think that the best leaders do blank but actually the research says they do exactly the opposite and you have a vast kit of those so along those lines you know what are some of the most common blind spots that you observe and that people could benefit from understanding and doing contrary action around as it relates to let's say interpersonal relations in the workplace or at home

and and maybe we could see this with finding that you've also written about which is that you know people who have an exert of a lot of proficiency and even control in their professional life will sometimes bring that to their relationship life and that doesn't work

right the idea that like being in charge and being confident is a great is a great set of attributes but it can really fail us in other domains can we weave that in with blind spots yeah we can so I think that so what one of the things I found over the past few years is that and this is inspired by a Phil Tetlock framework a lot of us spend a lot of our time thinking like preachers prosecutors or politicians

yeah so you think about these as three mental modes that even if you never worked in any of these careers you you will watch your thinking colored by at least one of them more often than you would like so in preacher mode you're basically proselytizing your own views and you I mean Andrew you're a in some in some situations I think of you as a highly effective professional debunker of preachers of you know certain kinds of snake oil when it comes to health and you know and biology

sometimes you take that too far and people might accuse you of being a prosecutor where you're attacking other people's views and then the third mode politician mode is is basically you don't even bother to listen to people unless they already agree with your views

what I think is interesting is these these modes of thinking are adaptive for in certain roles so preachers make great sales people they're often visionary leaders prosecutors are often highly effective scientists right we excel at criticizing other people's work and finding what's wrong with it politicians are great at curing favor they do a lot of lobbying they win approval the problem is that all of these modes stop you from questioning your own assumptions and beliefs

so my I'll tell you my biggest vice is prosecutor mode I've been called a logic bully my wife had to explain to me that was not a compliment oh my goodness I mean I know I know you've experienced this too if I if I feel confident that they're strong evidence that somebody is wrong

I believe it's my moral responsibility to correct them and that never goes well amazing I won't reflect on my own experience I'll just say yes and yes right right that the logic word ninja mode is one that I think we're trained in as academics we are in that and you know or if you're a lawyer or you know or many other professions as well and I think it holds value and it can be very effective in certain domains but less effective in other domains

yes and I think part of the problem is you know when I actually whether you're preaching prosecuting or politicking excuse me or politicking you look like you're not open because you've already in all cases you think you're right and other people are wrong and so that makes it really hard for other people to reason with you to disagree thoughtfully with you so my favorite alternative and and this is at the heart of what you do for a living and for fun is thinking like a scientist

and when I say think like a scientist I do not mean that you need to buy a microscope or invest in a telescope what I mean is as you model so effectively a good scientist has the humility to know what they don't know and the curiosity to constantly seek out new knowledge there have been multiple experiments showing that when people are taught to think like scientists

their judgment improves and so do their decisions and I think a lot of that stems from when when you go into scientist mode you realize that all of your opinions are just hypotheses waiting to be tested all of your decisions are experiments and so you know I'm not trying to prove that I'm right I'm trying to find out if I might be wrong and then if I find out I am wrong

it's easier to pivot and instead of being really invested in being right I can try to get it right and I think in some ways that's the that's the meta message that I'm trying to communicate to people with my work is assumptions are meant to be pressure tested there meant to be questioned and challenged and if you're not open to rethinking your views then you basically turned thinking into a religion and I don't know about you but I prefer to face my views on good data as opposed to blind faith

and I think that's been a huge part of your contribution in the last three or so years to public discourses you've you've helped people think more scientifically and talk more scientifically about their daily habits and behaviors and I guess my my big question is how do we help people do that more often even in domains where they don't have access to scientific knowledge and they don't read journals

first of all that thanks for the kind of words of feedback I think you know my goal is always to you know identify who's coming to the podcast for health tools and protocols and hopefully teach them some science and scientific thinking and for those that are coming to the podcast for science and scientific thinking hopefully they get some health tools and protocols also but because I fell in love with science for the exact reason that you're describing

which is that I've I lived I grew up in a family that was very divided politically along religious lines along essentially every line of like what foods to eat what was healthy what wasn't and the only way I could reconcile these very frankly polarized views was to you know embark on the scientific method pose a hypothesis and then try and disprove one's hypothesis

and some things get through the filter and it's a constant learning so I should just ask when you teach people how to be a science and order to try and overcome some of their blind spots and be better thinkers better meaning it serves themselves and the people around them better

is that teaching them what a hypothesis is that a hypothesis is not a question it's sort of a your you wager on an idea with the understanding that you very well could be wrong and then you try and disprove that idea is that that sort of the crux of what in these experiments is

describing as teaching people how to be scientists if they just do that then they'll they're going to benefit I think that's that's at the very heart of the lens is I want to just double click on the idea of disproving your hypothesis right most people live in a land of confirmation bias where they're basically just looking for support for their pre existing beliefs that's right they're click for a

click for a change we all do this by the way I'm not criticizing here we all will have an idea and then we will click for a john line to support the idea that we disagree with them they did disagree with us ah here somebody I did agree with and that agrees with me I think and do you think this has roots in our you know in the neural circuit underpinnings of of

the system just wanting to have affiliation that affiliation feels good yeah having people that are like us knowing that we're kind of protected in that yeah I think that's a big part of it I think one of the reasons that we we encased ourselves in echo chambers and hide in filter bubbles is there's a strong evolutionary pressure to avoid social exclusion and so you know it's not it's not just that you know being drawn to affiliation it's also I

am afraid of being excommunicated from my group and if I challenge the orthodoxy of the community that I belong to I might be an outcast and I don't think I don't think every day people think through that logic but I think there's a there's a deep-seated visceral tendency to avoid that and you know I think the when we think about teaching people

to see their blind spots more clearly a lot of that is is recognizing it's hard to do that on your own because by definition your blind spots are invisible to you and so this is why other people's input is so important and I think

you know I know this makes a lot of people uncomfortable but I think everybody on social media should follow people that they disagree with but not just for the sake of it you want people who reach different conclusions from you but where you respect the integrity of their thought process those are the people who really stretch your thinking and I think that's what we're trained to do it's what I was trained to do is a social science social scientists is to listen to the ideas that made me think

hard not just the ones that made me feel good and to surround myself with people who challenge my thought process not just the ones who validated my conclusions and I think you know a lot of people hear that message and I know but I don't want to let that like that awful perspective into my world I know you want to be more nuanced in saying who are the people where before I knew

what their answer was I would be impressed with the depth and the thoroughness of their reflection and their analysis I should be following those people and learning from them regardless of the the hypotheses that they generate and the results that they share I'm so glad that you mentioned the importance of following people that you disagree with I think one thing that we have to highlight and I'm hoping will maybe even emerge from this conversation

is that follows are not endorsements and this is actually a real problem I mean there are academics who have lost their jobs not necessarily for following certain accounts but for commenting on certain comment threads maybe even alike is it is a slightly different category because it's as the name suggests it's a like it's it sounds like and it's thought of as a vote of approval of what's there but when one's options are just you know a heart a follow or no heart no follow

you know I was a big fan of the thumbs up thumbs down I kind of like the thumbs up thumbs down because at least you have that you have an option to to to descent without getting into online comment battles and things that sort but listen I've I've had people ask me why do you follow so and so because

follow is also seen as a sign of support because you're adding adding followers and presumably in the algorithm raising prominence to a channel yeah but I'm right there with you I follow lots of accounts of people who I fundamentally disagree with but I'm trying to learn and I'm also trying to understand what what their capture points are like like why people find them so intriguing yes anyway I'm a learner I'm a forager like you so I I'm in the same boat and everyone's a while I think

it's stunning to me I don't know if you've ever looked at your your Instagram statistics but somebody a colleague might actually showed me as I didn't I didn't realize you could look at the effect of each post on follows and unfollows I didn't realize that and you know the I think my typical ratio might be two or three to one for a post so you know I'm gaining two or three to follow two or three

followers to everyone that I lose the idea that I could post anything that would cause someone to unfollow me like if I said something interesting enough that you thought I was worth following how could how could one post change your mind about that I think you're too focused on what I think and maybe not paying attention to how I think was my my first reaction to that my second my second thought was well maybe maybe what's happening here is like people show up and they don't

realize the foundation of evidence behind the total body of work and so one post you know strikes them wrong and they think this person is not credible or they think that this person has you know lost sight of you know of what rigorous sciences I wonder if you you've had that experience to of I think I make a mistake of taking for granted that anybody who followed me knows that if I post something I think it's worth thinking about and you know it's

been carefully studied and I didn't have a you know I didn't have a dog in the fight I read this research and said this cleared the bar not only of an academic journal but I read the methods and I found them sound enough that we ought to be discussing this idea have you had that experience to I certainly have and I should say that you know I was weaned in an academic culture three

separate mentors very different styles all of whom were excellent mentors but all of whom taught me that you know there are phenomenal papers where every bit of information in the paper and indeed how it's written from start to finish is just watertight and incredible and there are other papers that are less watertight but occasionally there will be papers where one data point in a figure is intriguing enough to consider following that central in your own work

even if the rest of the paper is kind of I mean one data point now that doesn't mean taking one data point casting it out to millions of people on social media as an actionable item is valid that's certainly not what I'm saying but what I do realize

that I'm realizing again now after what you just said is that indeed people don't know the context which like what like what filters are we working with before we bring things forward and I think that you know my belief is that if it's grounded firmly in the scientific method that that's the best starting place

that earlier and I also understand that scientists differ tremendously in how they look at even the same data in the same paper so there is no governing body that says okay this paper means blank the authors have their interpretation the students have their interpretation in fact the course I used to teach to undergraduates which grew into a very large course we learned

for questions what's the question that the authors were asking sometimes a sub question what methods did they use what did they find and then what did they conclude and does it relate back to the original question and that simple breaking out of four questions of studies essentially what I do for all studies but I have my way of doing it and it's going to differ from the way that other people do it social media I think what's interesting is that I think there's always going to be a core following of a given person like your followers that they're going to do it.

So I think that they're going to trust you know not necessarily cross the board but there's a general acceptance of ideas coming through I think that on social media it's hard to strike a balance between setting the whole context and the action will take ways I get criticized a lot for not being concise enough and I agree but I but I also get

you know what I'm doing is taking things out of context yes so such a tightrope walk it's a tightrope walk and it's always going to be a tightrope walk and so I'm going to just you know keep going and I know you will too and listen I there's there's some kids out there surely not going to be one that they're going to take our jobs eventually and and we'll find a way to do it much better who knows through AI or something that might be robots.

I feel like this is an appropriate place to ask about something else since we're talking about sort of perception of of others and and gleaming information over coming blind spots and something that you've written about some years ago now I guess it would be almost eight years ago now about authenticity.

You know the word authenticity is such a minefield such a minefield I was going to say such as such a gravitate positive gravitational pull like oh they're really authentic as opposed to what's the opposite of authentic fake right but I think we could all learn to draw some lines between authenticity and over sharing right well how do we gauge authenticity and we can refer people to that article you wrote some years ago I think you may have written it differently where to be right written.

Today you talked in that article about somebody who essentially decided to tell everyone that he worked with all the things that he was interested in doing with them relating to them and it did not serve him well. Yeah so that's often right and so then there's this this notion of benevolent deception in order to preserve relationship and importantly it brought about a word that we don't hear about very often but that I I rather like which is etiquette like there's so for so many years.

Like there's so for social media by the way I apply classroom rules I'll tolerate any comment in the comment section but not the sort of comment that I wouldn't tolerate in a classroom you started insulting other you can insult me but if you want to insult other people I'm not going to tolerate that so that's where I draw the line classroom rules there's an etiquette and I think that etiquette is important so how do we balance authenticity with etiquette and also with preserving ones.

With preserving ones one's public life or private or private life authenticity at home seems important you can be your complete self at home except when you want to you know physically hit your sister or brother because they your ice cream that's not the right kind of authenticity.

No, no it isn't I think well there I think it's such a rich and complicated topic I think first thing is I I don't want people to be disingenuous ever but I have a real problem with people saying as an excuse for disrespectful behavior well I was just being myself I think David Sideris said yes but yourself is an asshole.

So good so good and I think I think what people forget is that we have we all have multiple selves right you you I mean you've you've known this your whole career we all have multiple identities we also can think about yourself as your thoughts your emotions your values your personality so which facet of yourself are you trying to be true to I would argue that authenticity without boundaries is careless authenticity without empathy is not a good thing.

So that's what I think is not a good thing is that you're not a good thing to be a good thing without empathy is selfish and part of being authentic is caring about other people's values that should be one of your values. So what that means concretely is I don't think we should worry about being authentic to what we're thinking and feeling in any given moment.

I think what we want to ask is what I'm about to do or say consistent with my principles and sometimes that means you will be false to your personality in order to be true to your values.

You're not honoring your thought or your emotion in the moment but you're doing that with a broader view toward who is the person that I want to be there is a cultural critic Lionel Trilling who wrote about the idea of sincerity as opposed to authenticity and I really like this distinction he said when you when you try to think about being authentic you're trying to bring the inside out and to point entry that's not always appropriate or effective.

He said sincerity is a little bit more about bringing the outside in so pay attention to the person you claim to be and then try to become that person. And that was a little bit of an aha moment for me I realized you know there are all these people who say well you should you know you should you should walk your talk. And I think that's good advice I might even go a step further and say you know maybe you should only talk it if you're already walking.

Maybe maybe that would help us avoid hypocrisy but I think the fundamental message here is that we all we all could be authentic to one part of ourselves and in authentic to another part and I think the most important part is to ask what do I stand for and if I'm what I'm about to communicate is not consistent with that and maybe maybe I could self sensor.

That's great advice and I suppose one has to wonder about the role of emotional states you know I think there are career ending mistakes that people make in a moment especially online nowadays and by the way this is not just for people who are already established in their career I've heard stories and there seem to be more more of these in the news of of for instance you know videos of things that people said some years earlier getting them ejected from college.

A guest on Lex Friedman's podcast who works in the securities world said that one of the lessons that he teaches his kids is to not film themselves doing bad things but in and of course also not to do bad things but in general to just not film themselves doing anything because of his understanding of the risk of doing that and we don't want to create a paranoia but

gosh I mean who you are when you're 14 is a very different person than who you are when you're 27 and when you're 50 so I hope so you know and so yeah I think you know balancing authenticity across the lifespan and we're expecting young minds to do this and clearly older minds can't do it either I mean I this is a pretty well in case of a chair of a major site the major

psychiatry department we won't name the university but basically lost his job for a single tweet he just was not being thoughtful in fact he was being really like numb to to other people and lost his job and I think he probably I don't know him and it was obvious why he lost it I don't think it was debatable but gosh you think about somebody who's a chair of psychiatry which means there's

a psychiatrist which means they're trying to think about thinking and there you go it's amazing how common this is and I think one of the things that's fascinating to me is I guess this goes back to something we were talking about a moment ago but I I think that when we communicate we have access to the

some total of all of our thoughts and everything we've ever ever said that we can remember and we forget that other people only have a snapshot and so one of the questions I like to ask is if this was the only post that somebody saw mine would have a proud of it would communicate who I am and who I aspire to be so good the answer is no maybe I should pause before I put that out there that that is excellent advice if you were the only

post like you're one and only representing you. Fantastic that now that could be paralyzing if you're a perfectionist you'll never post but I think for somebody who's posting regularly it's a good filter to just ask am I am I being thoughtful enough.

So good and won't add anything to that just say I'll just say so so good let's talk about potential I was in junior high school and I remember having a social studies teacher who she just would go on and on about potential she has special program after school you could get involved potential potential potential and we hear about this and we have untapped potential you hear we're only operating at 40% of our

abilities you know people will say that the implications that we have reservoirs of potential that we're just not accessing because we're not doing the right things thinking the right things I know you've now researched this topic extensively give a new book on this topic tell us about potential like do we all have huge reservoirs of potential that we are not accessing and of course I

and everyone else wants to know how can we access those but maybe could also tell some of the myths around potential and tell us about potential such a such a sticky topic for all the right reasons thank you I you know it's one of those things where you've had this experience I'm sure many times where you start thinking and talking about a

topic and you realize it's it's been your whole life but you didn't see it until then and I feel that way about potential I think that I've been passionate about helping people achieve their potential as long as I can remember I think every every goal I've ever set has been about stretching my potential in one way or another or at least realizing it and what I become so struck by as I've studied this topic is we all have hidden potential

but we don't know how to unlock it so why do we often underestimate our own potential we judge ourselves by us by our starting abilities and this is more common for people with fixed mindsets but even people with growth mindsets you try a new skill it doesn't go well and you think this is not for me I'm not cut out for this and then it gets worse when other people also you know you're not just

underestimating yourself you're also being underestimated by others other people watch you and say yeah you don't have the you're not a natural you don't have the talent that it takes and I think the big myth there is that raw talent is the most important driver of how high people climb it's not motivation and opportunity matter more than

the ability for growth motivation and opportunity yeah you know obviously everybody starts at a different point but how close you come to your potential is much more about the character skills you cultivate to to improve it improving over time and then whether you're in a situation where you

have access to the knowledge that you need and the tools you need to keep growing and so you know concrete example this for me is when I when I started diving I was way too late I picked it up as a teenager a lot of the elite divers in the world start by five goodness actually in China there's their hand picked

by for body type and sent to a version of diving boarding school where they don't even teach kids how to swim they tie a rope around them so that they can just pull them back after after they they hit the water in the deep end well part of the body tie a rope around I think it's their waste so they're diving with a rope so that when they get in the water they're not wasting any energy exactly they're just being drags

through the water and out that's that it's my understanding of it wow but Brazil like they have to walk they have to climb yeah okay so there's a bunch of other things they have to do the swimming apparently is very secondary anyway so I started really late and I lacked most of the things that you would want as a diver I couldn't touch my toes without

bending my knees my teammates called me Frankenstein because I was so stiff when I walked so lacking the flexibility I have no rhythm my coach brought a metronome to practice one day and I couldn't even keep the beat so you know you think about diving as a sport of grace nope and then I also couldn't jump and I couldn't twist either and it's like you're missing the explosive power you don't have the the athleticism and I think if I had if I had just looked at those abilities I had no

business being a diver and in fact no business being an athlete I'd already been cut from the middle school basketball team three times I didn't make the high school soccer team those were the two sports I had poured a decade into this is going nowhere Eric just the most incredible coach I could ever imagine he said to me on the

first day of practice he said you know yes you're missing all these things but I believe if you if you pour yourself into the sport that you could be a state finalist by the time you finish high school and he saw more potential in me than I saw myself and that just lit a fire under me and you know what they're translated into is a lot of the behaviors that that you and I both studied you know setting specific difficult goals for I want to learn these dives

that seem out of reach for you know I want to increase my score over the next three meets by ten points for I want to learn how to you know all my limitations not standing one thing that I can master that I've total control over is how clean I go into the water I can get a rip entry so that there's no splash and that's the most important part of a dive and one of the

greatest compliments ever got as a diver was I came out of a meat in there's couple years and I think it was maybe a junior in high school and one of the judges turned to Eric and said all he can do is rip and Eric said so it's awesome it's almost like saying all you can do is win you know it was it was a great backheaded compliment but Eric was like listen he made the dive it has a degree of difficulty maybe he didn't jump as high as he wanted maybe his tight his

tuck wasn't as tight as he wanted but at the end of the day that dive disappeared straight up and down into the water you can't not give that a seven and that ended up serving me really well and so I think the broader lesson here for me was Eric said to me

actually last year I never thought about this he said I never got close to even qualifying for Olympic trials I did not have the talent to be that good but I got way better than I ever expected and Eric said to me he said looking back he said you got further with less talent than every any diver I've ever coached and that was so meaningful to me and what it reminded me was my

protest accomplishments were not in the areas where I started out with the most talent they were in the areas where I had overcome the most obstacles and I think that to me is really what drives people around potential is to say it's not performance that's

motivating it's a sense of progress I love that story and I and I couldn't agree more I mean I think or knows my favorite topic in sciences the course I performed at least after my freshman year which was a bismill least well in the phase when I was doing well and it's neural development I now teach

neural development neural development I'm bad where you at it at first okay well I have to put in context my high school and freshman year college were abysmal right I basically no place being there I can only thank my high school girlfriend for being so wonderful that I followed her off to college and ended up there left after my freshman year came back and then at that point it was like a step function I work out of fear and excitement and love of the material I was a

straight a student there after but in my senior year senior year excuse me I took a course in neural development which was extremely challenging and I got a B plus and that B plus still gets me you know but it's a topic that I love the most it's what I did my graduate

thesis on what I teach at Stanford among other topics and and I like to think now I have I guess humility side considerable mastery over the the material but it's because I didn't do as well as I would have liked and I applied myself so much and I think that it just didn't come naturally to me and then eventually over time you kind of get it or you get you get it so it's it but it's still my favorite topic because it was that

friction point right it's the ratcheting through and there's something I don't know that's just so intrinsically satisfying to me I used to watch my bulldog master of costello like chewing on a bone or when he was on a brick because you know he had a kind of a Homer Simpson brain about his object choice to chew on and he just looked like he was in just total bliss it was like this effort combined with some intrinsic pleasure of the process and so I think that when

he's ratcheting through something that's hard it feels so good that it's almost better than the outcome like it it is better than the outcome I think it is and you know it's it's fascinating because this is why I'm always bothered by people saying play to your strengths because if you do that you will gravitate toward the things that come naturally to you and you're going to miss out on the very often the skill that was hard for you to learn to

your point is one that you end up with greater mastery over because you had to put in the extra effort and you end up deriving more more satisfaction out of the fact that you know I this was really tough and I figured it out you know implicit in your story and maybe partially explicit in some parts

when I was when I was looking at the character skills that help people realize their potential and really fuel unexpected growth I ended up finding three that I think are under discussed and and well supported by science I think that that basically if you want to reach your potential or you

know it's even more than you think your capable of we're looking at becoming a creature of discomfort and embracing things that are unpleasant or awkward for you that'll be the first thing the second is is being a sponge and soaking up new information and also filtering feels filtering out what might not be useful and then the third is is being an imperfectionist which is knowing when to aim for excellence and when to settle for good and I hear all of those themes in your story

I you know that was obviously uncomfortable you like you got to be plus you don't want to do any more neural development it was so frustrating and so exciting to me at the same time and then I went everything I did in the five or seven years that followed was all about learning more about this topic because it wasn't about performing well or proving myself I just I love the

material so much more because of how challenging it was and I'm grateful to you Ben Reese professor at UC Santa Barbara incredible neural development and laboratory scientists because you know I think had I gotten an an a I don't know that I would have fallen in love with it in the same way isn't that weird you wouldn't have had to work at it to discover what was fun about it I imagine no absolutely and it's still one of my favorite topics to teach and learn about

so you mentioned discomfort being a sponge slash filter if I got that right and an imperfectionist tell me more about the imperfectionist piece because I feel like I've had students in my lab and I've known people in other domains of life that they're they're absolutely paranoid about shipping something out for the world to see it and of course like no one wants to put stuff out into the world that isn't right and got for big could be wrong

or that's going to embarrass us so you can understand why people are perfectionist but I never really understood the the extreme perfectionist like how do they ever do anything and are they happy people because I can't imagine that they are no I mean this is so Thomas Kern I think is the world's leading psychologist studying perfectionism and if you look at his meta analyses perfectionism is a recipe for burnout and depression and anxiety

because you're constantly comparing yourself to an ideal that's unachievable perfectionists are not they do get better grades in school slightly but they don't do any better at work then there appears because I think in school you have a predictable outcome you have a general sense of what's going to be on a test and if you study hard enough you can come closer to the A plus whereas at work performance is much more

fabulous and so what happens to perfectionist a lot of times is they end up optimizing the things that are predictable and controllable and then you know sort of missing the forest in the trees and I think the you know the the antidotes as far as I know really have to do with calibration so you know I talked earlier about how I like to ask for a zero to 10 to find out you know I am the ballpark or not

well I biggest liabilities as a diver was I was never satisfied with my score and one day Eric said to me you know you hear Olympic judges talk about your commentators talk about the perfect 10 that's a misnomer if you look at the diving rule book a tennis for excellence not for perfection there's no such thing as a flawless dive I can look at dives that have gotten straight tens and point out nineteen things that were wrong with them but they were excellent

and so then we had to define the standards of excellence so what I have as a recovering perfectionist somebody who you know just beat myself up constantly fact I got we did paper plate awards on my swim team and one year I was given the if only a word and there's a little cartoon of me and it says if only I had pointed my left pinky toe I would have gotten an eight and a half instead of an eight and that was like the story of my my diving career and I did not want to be that person anymore

and so one of the things I learned to do is to when I start anything you know if I sit down to write a book I'm aiming for a nine and the reason for that is I'm going to pour a couple years of you know my work life into this topic you know hopefully a lot of people are going to read it and I want to make sure it's truly the best work I can produce social media posts I'm okay with a seven if I'm only shooting for a nine I'm not going to post very often

because you're not you're ceiling for nine is your threshold for nine is so exceeding this high yeah and I wanted to keep getting higher over time so my idea of a nine today is much more challenging than it was ten years ago and I think this is this is what people probably don't do enough especially if you're an extreme perfectionist is they don't realize okay let me let me figure out how important this task is and then for this task a six is sufficient

so that then I can pour my energy into you know pulling the the seven and a half toward a nine where it really matters and inevitably if you don't do that what you will do is you will get a bunch of nines on things that are completely trivial I went to a high school where we had a couple kids get perfect on the SAT they would have the big like centerfold list of all the early admissions to all the fancy Ivy League schools

definitely was not on that list I don't even know if I yeah I don't even know if I was anywhere near that list probably not and some of them have gone on to have terrific lives and seem pretty happy and I know a number of them in contact with them and I think for some of them that performed exceedingly well on standardized tests really on I hear a bit more dismay in their in their current life not all

but is there I have to imagine there are data on his sort of early high performance being a seed for challenges later on obviously you don't want the opposite the sort of what I guess they refer to now as a complete failure to launch you know people not meeting that the milestones towards being self sufficient adults but what are some of the dangers of success when thinking about realizing one's larger potential

that's such an interesting question I think yeah I think the data in this go both ways so you know some early success is you know it's a motivator it builds the kind of momentum you were talking about earlier you know like there's a goal setting researchers like lock and lathe have talked about the high performance cycle where you hit a goal and then that builds your confidence and then you said a more ambitious goal and then you reach it and there's a

upward spiral over time but there's also a mountain of evidence that achieving your goals can make you complacent and there's a sometimes it's called the fat cat syndrome where you were investing on your laurels and then there are also competency traps where you get good at something and then you keep doing it the way you've always done it and you don't realize the world is

changed around you like I'm allergic to the idea of best practices the moment you call practice best you've created an illusion that you're done and the moment I think about pre-COVID a lot of companies had really you know what they thought were effective models for collaboration and they're best practices are not feasible because everybody's working remotely and they've got to throw that out the window and look for better practices for an evolved world

so I think those are the things I worry about most with early success I think that one of the things I would love to see more people do when it comes to reaching potential is to figure out what is my failure budget look like so I'm telling you my experience on this you know I started I wrote I wrote a first book gave a TED Talk and pretty soon felt like I was spending 80% of my time saying things I already knew and I was getting typecast

I'm like I'm not learning and growing but I'm also not I don't feel like I'm contributing new knowledge to the world what am I going to do about that and 2018 rolls around I'm like you know what this I'm going to start a podcast and that will be my you know my learning mechanism

and I didn't know if it was going to work I didn't know how the medium would work for me I didn't know if people were going to want to listen to my voice I certainly don't maybe Morgan Freeman likes the sound of his own voice I like listening to your podcast I also enjoy listening to yours but I think everybody hates the sound of their voice

I just I just wasn't sure for a lot of reasons whether it was going to work and then I thought about it and I realized well all of the pivotal moments in my career have come from taking a risk and I thought that I needed to build the confidence in order to do it and I was reflecting on goal setting research as one does realized

you know like the confidence is going to come through doing it and so let me try it and I guess what I took away was if I don't if I never fail it means I'm not challenging myself I'm not embracing discomfort I'm not being enough of an imperfectionist so I said I actually said a goal that I would start at least one project every year that didn't succeed

and let's be clear I'm not aiming for failure what I'm doing is is creating an acceptable zone of failure to know that that's going to motivate some risk taking and some experimentation and hopefully some growth and I know it's hard for a lot of people to do this in their lives especially if you have a you know it's super demanding boss

but I think we're all better off from a you know a growth and potential standpoint if we've got you know if you if you succeed on 90% of your projects that should be a hugely successful year if you succeed on 100% I think you're aiming too low what are some of the projects that you are currently spinning in the back of your mind that would be fun but if you're willing to share that for you still strike a little bit of anxiety

chord like I don't know like are you I don't know are you a musician do you not know all right are you okay thank you repeat are you thinking about becoming a musician or exploring playing music I mean what how the reason I ask it that way is how far into your discomfort zone do you reach in order to in order to challenge yourself because because I think that everyone needs to have thresholds like there are a lot of things that yeah I wish I could play a musical instrument

frankly but I'm not that motivated to do it mostly because I enjoy hearing other people play music so much that I'm perfectly happy I'm sated yeah there's also enough good music out there yeah I have to create there's definitely a lot of great music yeah

so I think there's a there's a micro and a macro version of this so on the microside and then past year I did this work life podcast for five years where I was you know taking the core of my organizational psychology work and trying to take on a topic and make it interesting and useful to people

and then realizing I was feeling constrained just to focus on work and as a psychologist there's lots of other things I want to take on and so we expanded into this second show rethinking and I have some experiments I'm tempted to try but I've been really hesitant to do them so did you watch wrestling growing up ever

professional wrestling I did watch a little bit of it and then for whatever reason in the last year my good friend Rick Rubin who's he's not obsessed but he is a real devotee he's a fan of professional wrestling he had me watch some WWE but even AEW he was explaining that it's basically physical drama he's explaining why it's so intriguing to him and so informative to him and then I'm a big fan of certain genre music

and large Fredrickson from rancid is a huge wrestling fan so now got multiple people that have come into contact with her like telling me all this stuff about wrestling so wrestling seems to be cropping up more and more all right so I don't know the first thing about wrestling I think I caught it a few times as a kid likewise it was a Hulk Ogan and a few others passed across

to a man yeah but the thing that I remember was loving the tag team matches where you know somebody would get overpowered and then they pull in somebody to help I would be so interesting if there was a podcast where you take issues that people fundamentally disagree on and you started a bait and then somebody can tag in if they want

to challenge an argument and so instead of constant concentrating on the particular guests you have you basically have a problem you're trying to you know to get to the roots of and you're going to have all these people jump in and hopefully build toward a more insightful perspective on it

no idea if this is going to work I'd really love to try it and this is the first time I've spoken out loud about it because I don't know that I want it like that I want to see that crash and burn and yet like why not like what's the risk I think it's so cool yeah what topics are are you thinking about covering because I can think of some pretty pretty controversial topics but I want to know what the ones you're thinking about

well I mean I literally just I mean I'm thinking out loud here but one one that I think on the controversial front that would be could be really rich is to think about policies for trans athletes in sports that's a controversial controversial but also I've talked to some experts on this I've talked to some trans athletes and the people who are deep in this do not know what they think the policy should be

and so I think actually hearing them talk and you know understanding the complexity of those issues and then you know maybe hammering out what's a policy you'd propose for schools what would you want for you know for Olympic events I just think that would be fascinating and I'd love to I'd love to moderate that discussion goodness I would I wouldn't I don't want to get into that one glad you would I wouldn't that seems like one of the most barbed wire topics one could ever

embark on which is exactly why I'm going to put in my vote you absolutely should do this podcast I think it's an amazing idea actually folks put in the comment section on YouTube whether or not Adam should do this podcast and and that topic in particular I think it would be amazing because one thing that keep coming back to in my own mind is that a lot of the controversies out there stem from the fact that we very often have individuals

pitted against individuals and there's so much lost in that and I think about science and going back to the scientific method where we have subfields pitted against subfields when when you talk about a field like there was huge controversy over the structure of DNA and it wasn't one individual against another what you had

small groups different camps and there was some partial overlap there's also you know if you read the double helix there was also a lot of people entering romantic relationships just to glean information from the other side you know human beings not not at their finest but in any event small panels arguing competing teams competing I think is far more interesting and informative than individuals you know butting heads I

think so to and I think you know another another one that I think would be really interesting I mean I'm like people always say great minds think alike no great minds challenge each other to think differently and we just don't do enough of that so I've been thinking a lot politically what if we brought together a bunch of people who are not ideologues but are really interested in

pragmatic policy solutions to rewrite the constitution if we were going to build one today you'd like to tackle big stuff I just know I love it I love it it's a compliment it's a compliment you know I mean what are the odds like I said earlier no weak sauce no weak sauce like you just you're you go right for it I mean these listen these are the issues that

people are really activated by because these are really core issues they get down to the autonomic nervous system they're in the hypothalamus as we say I don't think they should be like I look at these topics and think I just want to get it right I don't have a vested interest in what the model should be I just know that even the wisest people of 250 years ago were not prepared to anticipate the world we live in today and we ought to be constantly I don't

know I don't think you should live in a world where you affirm your beliefs I think the only way you learn is by continually evolving your beliefs and so I guess I'm trying to figure out more ways to catalyze that around issues people care about but I don't care about the

issues I care about the stretching of thinking and the improving the way that the world works I'll tell you if you decide to do this podcast with the tag team format I love that you gleaned it from watching wrestling a couple of times around these very controversial issues I promise you that will be one of the most popular and important podcasts on the planet earth might be podcasts on other planets I hear that they're you know galaxies far far away with a they may have

podcast to may have had them for much longer than we have but that's that's a winner well maybe maybe I'll try it as a little experiment on the rethinking feed and see if it's an unmitigated disaster well you know where my vote lies I appreciate that so okay so to go back to your question for a second on the macro side I've always thought it would be fun to try to write a sci-fi novel and the question I'm wrestling with right now is is that a good use of my time they're great sci-fi

writers out there there aren't that many social scientists communicating about the topics that I do and it feels like it might be it might be I don't know like this is it might be too much of a diversion then again according to your words you had no talent in diving but you exceeded all all performance metrics by by considerable amount through motivation and and opportunity I got that right I vote yes I'm not I haven't read much sci-fi

maybe I need to read read more sci-fi are you a fan of sci-fi I love sci-fi it's it's one of my favorite ways to imagine a better world and also you know prevent a worse one from emerging but I don't know there's a there's a part of me that thinks all right there's a there's a root Bernstein and colleagues did this do you know this research on no-bow prize winning scientists and what differentiates them from their peers no but being the son of a physicist and having been

surrounded by just by circumstance a number of no-bow prize winners when I was a kid young kid I'm very curious to know what the this research says I mean there there there are many themes you could glean from it but the the thing that really jumped out at me is the

no-bow prize winners are more likely to have artistic hobbies hmm fine men certainly did yep I mean there's a long list of them but if you break it down in the data it was their choices likely is their peers to play a musical instrument there are seven times as likely to draw a pain

there are twelve times as likely to do poetry or fiction creative writing and get this 22 times as likely as their peers 22 to dance act or yes performance magicians well former magician I was very excited about this yeah well I wasn't going to ask you out magic but let's talk about it I was on vacation every year I take my sister in New York for her birthday my birthday because our birthdays are close together and we went and saw a magician mentalist by the name of Aussie

wind Aussie I think is a correct pronunciation who just just like the last time I saw absolutely blew my mind I there's no way it's not magic of course I know it's not magic but it's um but my understanding is that there are things that he and other great mentalist and magicians do where they're not absolutely certain of the outcome they're they're playing it's probabilistic and so there's a risk and a thrill for them too and that they're

also creating memories and erasing memories and that's something that we I may host Aussie on the podcast because he's very effective at creating memories and erasing memories that's a lot of what he does tactics to do that in any event I wasn't going to ask about magic but I know that you were a professional magician at one point in your life and that you you did this presumably because you enjoyed doing it but

getting beyond the sort of pull the rabbit out of the hat or pick it or identify the card that the person picked out of the the shuffled stack what is it and what was it about magic that intrigues you it does it inform

anything about the work that you do now it does yeah I think it when I started I was 12 and I was just it was just fun and I was looking for a way to entertain other people and entertain myself in the process and then you know became a challenge can I learn this new scale and can I master this trick

I think nerdiest thing I did in college was I started a magic club with David Quang who is a stellar magician and a cruciferbalist as he calls it cruciferbalist does magic crossword puzzles essentially that I can't do it justice you have to see it it's unreal and I watch him for you know

our first performance together and realize one of us is going to make it as a magician and it's not me he's he's outstanding anyway the way it figures in my work now is I think so much of good science communication is misdirection and it's the same skill I use as magician if I told you that the

the card you picked was about to disappear from the deck and appear on the window you would not be nearly as intrigued as if it happened by surprise and I think the same is true when when we communicate knowledge I think it's it's actually why so many of my posts you flag this earlier so many of my

posts start with you know this thing is not what you think it's actually this other thing I think that you know challenging conventional wisdom questioning assumptions is is what surprises people and then leads them to think either I have something to learn or oh no I got to put up a shield

because my beliefs are being challenged or attacked and I think the the art form of magic was always about creating a surprise that would delight people as opposed to leading people to feel like they were tricked or duped or manipulated and so I think the the challenge for me is to say

okay I want to figure out what what do we know from behavioral science you know mostly focusing on psychology because that's my core expertise what do we know that's actually different from most intuition and then how do I explain that in a way that surprises people but leads them to say oh that's so interesting as opposed to that's wrong and then want to fight about it.

It's almost as if you give them the experience of what you're trying to teach them so that the oh that's wrong can't be the available response yes because in magic you know it's it's everyone knows it's magic just like with professional wrestling folks by the way there's

there's some prior understanding of what's going to happen maybe they go off script but I think that's actually I think part of the interest in professional wrestling for those that are extreme fans of professional wrestling is that they almost want to wonder about whether or not some of

it is not in the plan like it's a suspension of reality that I seem to enjoy right because if you know something's fake or well we should we should be I should be more careful about my language in with magic like when I went to see I see I mean I don't think it's actual magic but he's

able to give the illusion of magic the real illusion is that it's magic right it's not the illusion of making the card hop to somewhere else in the room and he is phenomenal and I highly recommend people go see his show if they get the opportunity but the I think they're doing a documentary

about him now actually there'll be some Netflix stuff as well but it's the illusion that magic exists that's so exciting so with science communication yet I always aim for four things I don't always achieve them but and I think you do as well if I may that a topic be interesting clear

ideally actionable but not always and the the quad effect is when it's also surprising so interesting clear actionable and surprising sort of is the the ultimate if there's sort of a like oh I didn't realize that but it's it's hard to find data points that satisfy all four criteria and the

surprising is the least important by far I assume table stakes is it's rigorous oh well okay sitting underneath all four of those points are that it's science that it's actual science right so one didn't just say it right it's not conjecture or theory so that means that there's data to

support it and that the data were collected with with the appropriate amount of rigor right so there's a there's a reservoir of stuff that sits underneath as a foundation so given the the baseline of rigor how do I find what's interesting clear actionable and hopefully surprising although

I would I would make a case there's a classic article that Murray Davis wrote one of my all-time favorites he was a sociologist who wrote a paper called that's interesting and he opened the paper by saying ideas live not because they're true but because they're interesting which

decimated one of my core beliefs like I thought it was accuracy the drove people's beliefs and he said no ideas live because they're interesting and then he goes to build an index of the interesting to explain when people are intrigued and his case is that most of interest is surprise and he

breaks down all the ways that you can turn conventional wisdom upside down you can say that something you thought was bad was actually good or vice versa you can argue that something you thought was homogeneous is actually heterogeneous you could argue that something you thought was

individual was actually a collective phenomenon or vice versa and he's got this wonderful breakdown of of all the ways of being interesting and he's the one who made the distinction between ideas that challenge weekly held assumptions intriguing you and strongly held assumptions you know sort of

fending you but I think from Davis's view and I think he's right a huge amount of interest is surprise and so but I don't think it's the only driver of interest so I might I might take your criteria and say okay we start with rigor we want to go to interest clarity and action ability

how do we get to interest let's build a sub model of the factors that drive interest and surprise might be it might have the biggest beta weight in the regression equation but what else what else drives interest I have a couple hypotheses I want to hear yours you've been doing this actively

and highly effectively beyond surprise what else interests people in your content anything that draws on self-reflection for them I think we all have an innate desire to better understand ourselves why why we work the way we do why we don't work as well as we would like

to insert domains like some and cast understanding on on our experiences of others too like oh now it makes sense like I've been going back to the the Conti episodes but we did several of them so for I think it's appropriate you know to learn from him that narcissism is envy it represents

a extreme deficiency in the pleasure that people narcissists can have an extreme pleasure drive but they they always feel like they have far less than they would like to have in that others have far more of it because they don't have that same yearning for it right and so that narcissism

at its core is deep envy that to me was like wow you know and to to realize that and to now understand that all this discussion that you hear out there about narcissists everyone calling other people narcissists that there are genuine narcissists out there and what they really suffer

from is an extreme deficit in pleasure and they're constantly envious of others it reframed everything I thought about narcissists about them being overbearing which they can be an off-and-ar um etc etc so I think it's also anything that leads to um like oh I can I can I can navigate

narcissists better with that well that I mean that checks all your boxes right it's very surprising because it's not the way we normally understand narcissism but I think you you hit on for me what's the maybe even it's at least as important as surprise maybe more so is self-relivence

and it doesn't have to be actionable right it has to in a lot of cases just help you understand or make sense of something that's been puzzling or that's you know that's um you know sort of I think I'm I'm almost always surprised when I say something from you know here's here's a synthesis

of research here's a meta-analysis and I think it's kind of obvious and people get excited about it because it gave them language to describe something they had felt but they didn't know how to articulate or talk about and I think that I mean I think this is why most of the most popular

TED talks are about human behavior because people are interested in people and if you learn something about you or about others you don't have to immediately do anything with that to find it intriguing and even useful because it enriched your worldview a recent guest on this podcast

we haven't aired it yet but um maybe it'll be out by time this this errors was with a lease of Feldman Barrett she's uh psychologist turned neuroscientist right stays emotionist and of course yeah and she described um in how in certain cultures there is a language for subcategories of

emotion emotional granularity right so you know she described a word in Japanese I don't recall the word was um that describes the the feeling of sadness that one has after getting a particularly bad haircut something that I don't think you or I are familiar with but I'm familiar

with from my experience of romantic partners doing like really unhappy with their haircut and you're like you're sad but they're but by having a specific word for a specific experience people feel less alone and the feeling passes more quickly in time and and then she gave some other examples

from German and from you know Scandinavian languages and so forth and I find this so interesting it's like the moment people hear that they are not alone in an experience there's nothing actionable about it but it creates a cognitive shift thereafter in which they suffer less um or maybe feel

more connected to others I mean I think it's really a beautiful example of exactly what you're referring to like when we learn about something and we we identify with it it's powerful it's very powerful and I think uh psychologist often say name it to tame it um affect labeling is one

of the most effective emotion regulation strategies and we talk when we talked about distraction and reframing earlier I should have said there's a third strategy which is literally just to describe what you're feeling um it it it seems to allow people then to reason with and process whatever

they're feeling as opposed to allowing the feeling to control them and I probably got the clearest sense of this in in 2021 um I read a New York Times article on um on languishing um the feeling of matte or blah and I have never had anything I any article I wrote resonate like this

and it just like all the the post the tag meet were just like it me it me it us and it was like these like one and two word reactions and I I don't think it was the content that mattered to people it was the just having the term um all of a sudden people realize this is originally

quarry keys is research that I was referencing um it had been a light bulb for me to say there's a if you think about the spectrum of well-being this is related to your mental illness versus mental health distinction um those are two extremes of the continuum and at one end we have depression

and burnout on another end we have you know well-being and flourishing languishing lives right in the middle as quarry describes it it's the absence of well-being so you're not depressed you still have hope you're not burnout you still have energy but you're not at peak functioning you're missing a

sense of purpose um you feel like you're stagnating and you're empty and you know there was something about just saying the word languishing that led people to to realize yeah that's a thing and of course we're languishing we're standing still in the middle of a global experiment that no one

opted into which violates all rules of consent um by by science last time I check um but I think that that's something that that probably is underrepresented when we're trained to communicate as scientists to say one of the most valuable things we do is we give people language to talk about

things and I think that's a massive part of um of your impact is uh this is one of the big things I've learned from you Andrews I used to be a little bit dismissive of um of cognitive neuroscience in particular I thought understanding the brain has not taught me that much about the mind like being

able to you know trace um uh let's take a simple example like when I read Joe the Dew's research being able to trace um you know certain um amygdala responses um you know as the root of how people deal with fight or flight and and thread I'm like I don't know that that helped me that much like

if I can just describe fight or flight do I need the amygdala and you've convinced me I was wrong about that because when people have when they understand the um the neurological substrates of their thoughts feelings and actions um they believe them more they're like oh like there is a

mechanism for this it's being produced inside my head and even though I can't see it um it's there and it can be studied with the tools of science um I think that's a really big deal and I I really regret the fact that I didn't spend more time on cognitive neuroscience because I think I'd be a

better site a better psychologist today oh well again thanks for the kind of words I think that um a fortunate evolution in our fields or even field if I may um over the last 10 years is that whereas neuroscience itself even used to be subdivided into neuro anatomy and the neurophysiology

it's lumped into all neuroscience but it now includes psychology computational neuroscience cognitive neuroscience it's all you know I think what I consider us um you know we have different perspectives and different training obviously but doing a lot of the same things um just uh

using different um different tisection tools and different different language based tools and listen what you've done uh I wanted to say masterfully I mean it was just with like extreme virtuosity is to wrap your hands around such an enormous literature related to psychology I

mean the human mind and behavior and thought processes and emotions and potential and you know so many topics end to um and to extract the most valuable gems from that literature and communicate them in a way that anyone can understand and um it's a it's an extreme gift uh to be able to do that

and it's um and it's clear it's working because like you mentioned this article on languishing which we will provide a reference or a link to it in our caption because I want to go read that now I mean I'm always struck by this feeling of like it might I'm not tired but you know like I've got tons

to do like why do I just want to sit here for a way maybe I need to sit here but then you get in all the like the uh okay but you know I need it there's a lot to do there's a lot to get up and go I don't want to waste my life and yeah rest is good too but I think languishing is something that

like like I definitely can resonate with that so when I had a bulldog it felt a lot easier to do because he was always languishing but um do you ever just languish or are you busy enough that you you just feel like you're always a forward center of mass I think everybody languishes I think

it's part of the human condition and I think it might even be evolutionarily adaptive because I remember another sort of uh like mind altering idea I remember reading Randy Nessie's argument that mild depression could be evolutionarily functional that you know obviously clinical depression

is debilitating in a lot of ways but you know low grade sadness um Lincoln's melancholy um we know one of one of the things I can do is broaden your field of vision um and you know for for many people sadness is a signal that something is not working and it can motivate problem solving

um it can in some cases um open access to new perspectives um unfortunately those potential benefits of sadness are often overridden by the motivational costs and also the the fact that you now spend all this time regulating your sadness and wondering why you're sad right and so it's

hard to harness but um I had a similar thought about languishing from this perspective to say that you know maybe moments of languishing open us up to change um when we get stuck uh sometimes we realize you have to move backward in order to make progress um sometimes you have to like

unlearn things that you thought you knew um in order to to keep growing and um I you know I don't a friend of mine said he read my languishing piece and he's like you're not the languishing type I'm like okay maybe everybody's baseline is different like I think one of the things I'm really

lucky to have is high reserves of energy um but for me languishing is like I felt like I did nothing today um and you know in a typical day like if I'm writing a book I should be able to like write a thousand words I'm proud of and I don't like a single word that I produced or I sat at my

blinking curse like staring at the computer screen and for that umpteenth time wondered like did they call it a cursor because of all the writers who've cursed it and then I end up googling what's the like what are the Latin roots of the word cursor where did this come from and like

that is not a good use of time it's like that's not forward mass that's like I'm spinning so yeah I think everybody languishes um and I aspire to do it less often but not never well that what does cursor what is the root of cursor people look it up put

if folks put it in the put it in the uh comments on youtube uh I did I did look it up oh good okay you'll tell us now no I feel like there's a there's a footnote and hidden potential and I'm trying to remember it comes from um Kurei I think and um the cursor um originally came nope I don't

want to do it I'm just give it I don't remember this is uh your hip your hip again was this smart enough to have discarded that information and you you have more important things to do forgive me for asking the question folks put in the comments on youtube so good I have one more question about

potential uh you have children correct three um and a lot of our listeners either are children or have children um and even for those that don't have children I'm curious with the vast array of knowledge that you now have about potential and the fact that kids are these incredible

sponges right they mean I mean they they certainly experience discomfort we know that they are sponges we absolutely know that sometimes they're filters we try and teach them to be filters and hopefully they are imperfectionists maybe there are kids that are just perfectionists by default

but to imagine that they aren't because standards come about when we become aware of other people's performance right what sorts of messages do you recommend parents give their kids and what sorts of messages are you actually implementing that perhaps are different than you uh we're

prior to researching and writing your book on potential oh interesting well the first thing I should say is um Becky Kennedy Dr. Becky is my favorite source of insight on parenting and she's changed the way I think of the way I think about a lot of what I do with our kids um but my wife

Allison is she her instincts about effective parenting are so sophisticated I feel like every day I learned something from watching her communicate with our kids and so I I came in thinking all right I'm gonna write this book about potential I'm not gonna do a parenting chapter because I want

everything to be relevant to parents and um sure enough there's a chapter that had nothing to do with parenting where oh I actually um I'm reading this research and there was a moment where I did something well and I didn't even mean to do it um and this is something that I think everyone

probably underutilizes I don't want to actually that's an overstatement I think a lot of people um don't appreciate the importance of of this approach to parenting um and I am trying to do it more often so um quick quick story and then I'll back up into the principle so I was uh I was getting

ready to give my first TED Talk uh a number of years ago extremely nervous um I'm a shy introvert I was for a long time afraid of public speaking I remember in college literally shaking um to raise my hand uh being that nervous and now I'm supposed to get in the red circle um not my idea of comfort

zone and I happen to mention to our oldest daughter that I was nervous and I asked her for advice on what I should do and she said I think I think at the time let's see she must have been she was seven maybe I think seven um maybe six anyway um she said uh look for a smiling face in

the audience so it was it was one of those moments where I'm like oh that's such a good idea um why didn't I think of that like oh yes I can do that I know people who are gonna be in the audience so I asked a couple of friends to sit in the front rows and I locked eyes with a couple of them

and my nerves went down a little bit so a couple weeks later um Joanna's getting ready to be in a school play and she's also shy and introverted and she's nervous and she asks us for advice and instead of telling her what to do I said well what did you suggest to me a few weeks ago

and she she remembered and she said look for a smiling face and it was it was one of like the it was one of the most moving moments of my life like Alison and I got to the play and she looked at us and she beamed and I just um I think what I learned from that experience was uh kids need to

feel that they matter and most of us think about mattering as um you know showing kids that they're unconditionally loved and giving them the support they need but we forget that part of feeling that you matter is feeling that you make a difference so as a kid feeling like you have

something to contribute as a parent asking my daughter for advice that boosted her confidence and I think that this is um I've come to call this the coach effect it's one of my favorite recent findings in psychology that uh when when you're struggling with something um your instinct is

to go to somebody else for advice and say I need guidance the problem is that keeps you in a passive frame of mind uh it makes you feel like you're dependent on others what you're better off doing is finding somebody else with a similar challenge and giving them advice and what that does is it

it shows you that you have something to give um it boosts your efficacy um the research on this by Lauren Eskris-Winkler and colleagues uh it's fascinating so people who give advice instead of receiving it um randomly assigned end up uh more motivated and more confident um and I think this

is something every parent could do right whatever challenge you think your kid is gonna face find a version of it that you're grappling with and seek their guidance on it and when they run into that same challenge they will have confidence that they can begin to figure it out on their own and you can be a coach in that process is opposed to just telling them what to do which they may feel like is not relevant or they may resist because they don't want to be told what to do by a parent so

that is my favorite parenting lesson from hidden potential. I love that and I love your statement that you know kids like adults want to matter you know that being it you know we hear you know make them feel important but so often that's tied to performance metrics and those performance metrics are the very things that are making them nervous or that are creating anxiety um I love it um are you

taking additional kids for adoption because I'm raising my hand. I think there'd be a lot more developmental psychologists in the world if uh if we choose our careers later. Super interesting topic and by the way I'm very much looking forward to reading your book uh hidden potential um clearly I have a lot to resolve around that issue because um I still hear miss rolf in the in uh middle school just telling me how much potential we have in that um and

then I wasn't accessing mine oh yeah it's like a voice in the back of my head um all the time and um even though I feel very happy with um many aspects of my life that there are a lot of things that I want to do that I haven't done and I think it's through uh uh you know limited uh what do they

call limiting self beliefs or things of that sort. So limiting beliefs. Self limiting beliefs. There you go I can't even say say the phrase um yeah I do I do think all your fans are like yeah that Andrew Hubertman really hasn't he hasn't really tapped his potential at all he's wondering at all

well keep in mind I've lived in a fairly narrow trench of of pursuit you know at 19 I got into this and I've been doing this like researching and teaching and doing research like for pretty much all I've done for like almost you heading into 30 years so and you too you've been in this in this

game for a long time and that's it's where we like to play but um but what I've learned from you today in addition to many other things is that um realizing our potential uh has so much to do with you know reaching outside we hear about our comfort zone but it's also reaching into our like deeper

wishes and thoughts and uh I keep going back to this idea of the tag team podcast and the origins of that in your mind it's like I never would have expected that but it also reveals something that sounds kind of like intrinsic to you like you maybe you like to see things play out

the way you think they should be played out as opposed to the what's clearly a um intractable battle of loggerheads yes that is that's a core value like I think there I can't imagine an unsolvable problem I love that and I want your I want your brain um

listen Adam I want to thank you first of all for taking the time to date to come talk to us certainly not just about your book but we covered an enormous range of topics I mean you talked to us about procrastination which is sort of the third rail of life for so many people

creativity and intrinsic extrinsic motivation and uh blind spots authenticity and and so much more but also I want to thank you for being such an active teacher on social media in the classroom you still run a research program you're doing TED talks you're writing multiple books you know

you're absolute phenom in terms of the the amount of information that you're putting out into the world and uh I must say I always always always learn from your posts your podcasts your books like there's certain people in the world they're exceedingly rare but you're one of them that when

they open their mouth people learn and they learn valuable knowledge and it's it's an incredible thing um to be on the receiving end and so I just want to say on behalf of myself and everyone else thank you ever so much for what you do and um please keep going well thank you that that means a

lot to me considering the source because I the sentiments are mutual uh I think every every time I whether it's reading one of your posts or seeing one of your reels um my overwhelming thought is that is a master teacher and if I had been lucky enough to take one of your classes I might have

gone more of the neuroscience direction well um and failed no no uh it would have been interesting to learn more about it minimum and uh I just have tremendous admiration for your commitment to making science um interesting clear and useful to people thank you all

consider us on the on the same team and in in that regard and um and I I probably will uh tap you about a potential collaboration I've been so much fun to work together um meanwhile again thank you for everything you're doing and um like I said just keep going and please come back again I feel like there are a thousand other topics we could talk about and that we should honored we'll try not to make you regret that thank you thank you for joining me for today's

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