Adam Grant ON: Why Discomfort is the Key to Growth and Strategies for Unlocking Your Hidden Potential

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like I'm squandering my potential. That's a travesty. Growth is part of how you feel like you're using your time well. The person you're competing with is your past self, and the bar you're raising is for your future self.

greatness in our lives. And today's guest is truly an expert and someone who's deeply obsessed and studied about these themes and subjects for a long long time, someone I love having on the show. I'm so grateful that he's returning on the show today. I'm talking about the one and only Adam Grant, an organizational psychologist at Wharton, where Adam has been the top rated professor for seven straight years.

Adam's books have sold millions of copies, and Adam's TED talks have been viewed more than thirty million times, and he hosts the hit podcast Rethinking. Adam's pioneering research on motivation and meaning has enabled people to reach their aspirations and exceed others expectations, and his new book is called Hidden Potential, The Science of Achieving Greater Things. I highly recommend you grab a copy of this book. This is

what we're diving into today. So if you love this conversation, you'll love the book because it will go so much deeper. Check it out. Adam, thank you so much for joining me.

you say it. You encouraged me, and I was like, what if Adam believes I could do something like this, maybe I can. So you were tapping into my hidden potential years before this book came out.

Good enough is good. I find that we are wired often to want things to stay exactly the same. We like how they are. Why should we get better? Why should anything get better? We should be satisfied with what we have, And often in the guise of contentment and peace, there's a sense of lethargy and complacency that, well, we don't need to grow, because you're just being greedy. So I'm presenting a spectrum of ideas there. I'm happy for

you to dive into any of those. But why does getting better and improving matter at all?

an A plus. And I think what we've lost sight of is that what people actually enjoy is a sense of progress, feeling like they have forward momentum. When I think about what does it look like to not grow, I don't think for most people that's good enough. I think that's stagnation. I think that's people's saying I'm stuck. I feel like my life isn't going anywhere. I feel like I'm squandering my potential, and I just I think

that's a travesty. And so I think growth is part of how you feel like you're using your time.

are either moving forward or we're moving backward. We're either getting faster and smarter or we're getting slower and not smarter. And I think when you recognize that idea that there is no staying the same, there is no we're just going to stay on this place and platform forever. You start recognizing, oh, I have to move forward and the pace at which I move. How have you guided people with that? I find like often we compare our pace

of growth and our pace of becoming better. And that's the hardest one because you're like, well, they got that body in three months, or you know, you've been the top grade professor for seven years, like I've only won that once, or whatever it may be. Pace of growth? How have you thought about pace of growth in your work for a long time?

like I should have gotten what they got. And I think there what's probably helpful is to make a different set of comparisons. You know. Part of what you could do is not think so much about pace as starting. Maybe focus more on starting points. So maybe somebody who's growing faster than you actually just art with more advantages than you did and you've traveled a greater distance. I don't think we pay enough attention to that would be

one thought. I think, obviously comparing to ourselves is helpful too, And I think that you know so often when it comes to benchmarking progress, I want to tell people, Okay, the person you're competing with is your past self, and the bar you're raising is for your future self. And if you can focus on that, it's a little bit easier to realize. All right, Yeah, everybody has a different starting point, everybody has a different pace. But if I

could tell actually, let me say this. I think so many people let their expectations rise with their progress, and so you set a goal today, you achieve it in six months, and then by the time it happens, it's almost a relief. I didn't blow it. Definitely, there's no joy, there's no sense of meaning and purpose. You sort of expected it and you would have been disappointed if it

didn't happen. I think the way you have that is you get in touch with your past self and you say, if you know, if six months ago me or five years ago me knew where I would land now, how proud would I have been? How excited would I have been? And if you keep that past self in mind, it's much easier to appreciate the I guess the strides that you're making.

comparison versus envy is the thief of joy. I think it's so subtle, but it's so nuanced and so powerful because you're so right that I always think of it in the same way that you either study someone or you envy them, And often the deeper you study someone, the less you'll envy them because you actually realize how far they've come and what they had to get through and challenges they had, and you start getting the energy from that study to say, oh, maybe I have that

within me too, and maybe I can find that within me too, because I have challenges I think for me.

or I'd stumble and stammer my way through it. And so the idea that I was now going to stand in front of a whole classroom or on a big stage was extremely a daunting. So what did I do. I went to speakers that I really admired and started studying them, thinking this is going to help me. And the first one I picked was MLK great, big, really yeah, I mean, what a great way to get tomorrow les.

So I watched his dream speech. I tried to take notes on, you know, on things I could learn from him, you know, I wanted to know, well, how did he get there? And so I start reading about it. He's thirty four years old. When he gives that speech, I might as well quit. I cannot believe the greatest speech in American history, you know, done by somebody who's you know,

not even close to his prime. And I think if i'd stop there, I would have quit, and it would have been easy to walk away from MLK as just an impossible role model. And let's be clear, he is an impossible role model. I will never I could work on public speaking for an infinite number of years, every minute of every day, and never come close to that.

What was helpful, though, was then sort of rewinding and realizing we usually see our role models at their peak, and we don't have the starting point, we don't have the distance they've traveled. So how did MLK get here? And turns out he started entering public speaking competitions when he was fifteen years old. That was two decades of practice.

The year he did his dream speech, he gave over three hundred and fifty talks, and so you know, if you think about the cumulative progress that was made, that's multiple lifetimes, you know, of effort. So I think that's that's the kind of sort of analysis that we need to do, and I don't think most of us do that.

And I forgot the exact number. But it's so interesting what you're saying, and that backstory of that journey, that growth, the skills development, the hours, the struggle, three hundred that year alone is pretty you know, it's Yeah, that's insane, and I think it's fascinating you talk about this. I mean, I want to. I want to read from the book a bit if you don't mind. So there are a couple of things that I picked out. So this is page twenty six for anyone who's listening or watching right now,

page twenty six of Hidden Potential. So character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experiences of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, vision cleared, ambition inspired, and success achieved, according Helen Keller, and then you go on to say that summoning the nerve to face discomfort

is a character skill. The way you were writing this book was so empowering because it was almost like you were pulling from you know, I know, of course everything's highly researched, everything's back toward science, but you were kind of pulling from a bit of a mind Luther King's face there, like the language in there of like summoning

the nerve to face discomfort is a character's skill. And so you're actually saying what we just talked about with them, Okay, that doing hard things, doing uncomfortable things, doing difficult things is actually where so much of this ability fit impotential comes from. But all of us shy away from it. You know, all of us don't want to do it. We're scared of it. You becoming a professor, that's scary. If you don't like public speaking. We avoid discomfort, we

avoid awkwardness, we avoid challenges. How do we summon the nerve to face discomfort?

Shetty needs to be empowered. And also, I love this image of you getting empowerment.

your idea of progress. I kind of saw it as a necessary evil, something that happens, you know, when you're learning and you're struggling, and you're tinkering with new skills and with the I think what the evidence shows is that people who are actually given the goal to intentionally feel uncomfortable. This is done in some cases asking people to go on stage to do improv comedy and literally

feel awkward on purpose. They end up growing more from that experience because they put themselves in situations that challenged them. And so I think that's what I had to do with public speaking. When I was starting to teach, is therapists talk about exposure therapy and they often recommend systematic desensitization to say, all right, let's start, you know, little seminar, and then you get to know a group of students well,

and then you can kind of build from there. I didn't have time for that, so I went to the opposite extreme of flooding and said, all right, I'm just going to volunteer to give guest lectures in front of huge classrooms of hundreds of students who I've never met before. For my friends classes. I don't know why they let me in. I don't why I volunteered. Yeah, they were overly good friends. Maybe they were sacrificing the whole class

for my growth, but extremely uncomfortable for me. And I remember, you know, just walking in and feeling like I do not belong here, I'm not qualified. It was a massive case of imposter syndrome. But I think one of the things that happened when I put myself in that uncomfortable situation is I realized it's not really going to go

worse than it did today. And reading through the you know, the comments, there were lots of suggestions for improvement and lots of criticisms, but there were also you know, little compliments about things people liked. I was like, okay, I can build on that. I can work on this. And I think, you know, just coming in with the goal, yeah,

I should put myself in a deliberately uncomfortable situation. It opened me to a much steeper learning curve than if i'd done the kind of let me dip my toe in the shallow end and then sort of take off the floaties and learn to swim one step at a time.

we want to be somewhere in the middle. But to the point that you made earlier, I think most of us aer too far in the side of avoiding discomfort, and so we make these very small incremental steps, and one it feels like we're not making progress, which is frustrating, and then two we often then don't take enough risks or try enough experiments to really stretch ourselves and move up to the next level.

whether to invest more time in it. Whereas if I was to have booked a six week course or a program on something, I may find by week three that this isn't something I want to study for six weeks, as opposed to I could have figured that out in twenty four hours if I just really obsessed about it, or if I'll play a sport and I'm thinking, oh, I like this sport, should I play it more? Let me play it for a whole weekend. Every hour of that I'm awake and see whether it fulfills me or

whether it's draining and tiring. And I feel like that's kind of what you're saying works is a better experiment.

or twelve, I had better hand eye coordination. I'd played a bunch of ping pong, and now it was decent enough at a racket sport. The tennis was actually fine, And I think that's probably relevant to many skills.

You go when you're out of milk, or you're out of cheese, or you're out of bread, and you go and stock up. And so I'll often do an audit of my internal unit and go, well, what am I feeling like I don't have? And I've talked about how a couple of years ago I was building my team and I realized that being a leader and a recruiter of very different skills and recruitment wasn't a strength that

I possessed. And I almost assumed that because I was good at certain things that I should be good at recruiting, and I wasn't. And I studied Daniel Coyle's book The Culture Code, which I love. Yeah, it's fantastic. And I interviewed him on the show too, and looked at his playbook and everything else, and that one book in and of itself made me better at recruitment. And so I always look at it that way. But how do people figure out what they're struggling with or what they're not

good at what they need to get better at. It's probably the right way to put it, because we have so many things we're not good at. Yeah, what do we know what we need to get better at?

I always want to look to my achilles heel. What's the one thing that's holding me back from a goal that I care about or a value that I'm trying to to And then the other is, what's an area of passion or curiosity that I'm excited to spend more time investing in And sometimes that's for me because I'm excited about it. Other times it's because I want to help somebody else. And I think those are reasonable questions

to ask. I think where a lot of people struggle is they know the domain already, right, so they've decided I want to be a better entrepreneur, or I want to be a better artist, or I'm interested in improving my coding skills, right, and they've kind of already figured out what part of life they're trying to improve that, but then they don't know what to focus on from there.

I think the mistake that a lot of us make is we end up asking the people around us that we trust for feedback, which is a perfectly reasonable thing to do, except when you ask for feedback, you get

a lot of cheerleaders and critics. The cheerleaders are basically applauding your best self, and the critics are attacking your worst self, and the critics leave you often demoralized, and the cheerleaders can make you complacent what you want As a coach, A good coach is somebody who sees your potential and then helps you become a better version of yourself. And so one of the things I learned through doing research for the book is that instead of asking for feedback,

it's often better to seek advice. So feedback leads people to think about what you did right or wrong yesterday. Advice helps people focus on what you can do better tomorrow. So the way I would like to I guess that I apply this personally is when I'm trying to figure out where I need to grow. Every time I get off stage, for example, or every time I finish a podcast interview, I will ask the audience or the host,

what's the one thing I can do better? Wow, which is enormously helpful because they start to give concrete suggestions, But I'm not immediately going to focus on the first thing that I hear. What I do is I ask a bunch of different people, and then I look for the patterns. And I think that what too many people do is even if they get to the point of asking for advice rather than feedback, they start to hear all these things they need to work on. They're like, WHOA,

this is overload. It's too much. I can't handle anymore. I can probably only improve one or two things at a time. What I would say to those people is, I feel a little bit overwhelmed by the number of suggestions are getting. You should actually seek more of them because that will help you find the signal in the noise. That will help you sort of figure out what one person's idiosyncratic taste and what is a bunch of people's you know, quality input. So I guess that's my favorite

way to figure out where you need to grow. Ask a bunch of people for advice and then focus on the common themes.

a great way to think about it. And it's hard too, because we do base so much of where we want to grow on what other people think we need to grow, and I wonder how we can get better at sitting with ourselves and reflecting on our days. I always loved that statement from Steve Jobs where he said that every couple of days I would look in the mirror and ask myself or reflect on if this was the life I wanted to live? Am I doing with my day what I'd want to do? And if it wasn't, then

I knew I'd needed to make a change. And that self evaluation, I think is such an important need because at the same time as listening to others, you need both. It's not an either or how have you done the self evaluation part as well, from going to someone who was scared of giving talks to being one of Ted's most prolific popular speakers of all time to obviously now you know traveling, book tours, events, everything else. How do you self evaluate now as you were then?

out to be a diver. I was really fortunate to have a coach who saw more potential in me than I saw in myself and said to me on day one, I will never cut a diver who wants to be here. And you know I'll put in as much as you want and as much as you put in. And one of the things I really struggled with was knowing when a dive was good and when it was improving. I felt like I needed to always aim for perfect tens.

And Eric Best, my coach, one day, sat me down and he said, you know, there's no such thing as a perfect ten. Wait, have the Olympic announcers been lying to me? What do you mean? The whole point is a ten is perfection. That's the appeal of this sport. And he's like, nope, if you look at the rulebook, a tennis for excellence, So even a dive that gets

a quote unquote perfect score is flawed. So then what we started doing was we set targets for each dive and he said, Okay, you know basic dive like a back dive, We're going to aim for sixes and I think that's within your range right now, and then we would level that up over time as I started to learn harder dives. I remember when I was doing a two and a half summersault with a full twist, like, let's just make the dive. You don't fail it. If

you don't do it for zeros, that'll count. And then you know we're aiming for fours and so we have dive specific goals. What I've done with that sort of post diving career is realize I never had somebody like this in my life. I need a judge, not just a coach. So what I will do is I'll ask people give me a zero to ten, how did that go?

And it's very rare for people to stay ten. Yeah, of course, ye, So then you know whatever they say, whether they give me a three, half or a six, I just want to know how can I get closer to ten. That's where I'm really trying to use other people's reactions as a mirror. From there, I'll ask for suggestions, But to your point, I need to make sure I'm also proud of my own progress and I'm focusing on

my own principles. And so the last analysis that I do, after I get the judges' ratings and the advice from anybody who's willing to coach me, is to say, Okay, let me go back to the version of me that set this goal in the first place. Would that version of me be proud? And if the answer is no, I don't care what score I got, Yeah, how do you navigate this?

like that. And my parents forced me to go to public speaking in drama school when I was eleven years old. So I started learning public speaking because I was a shy kid. I have a very similar public speaking story to you when I was eleven years old. So I wasn't born with a skill. It was something that was harnessed and developed, except for the accent. Except for the accent which I was born with. Yes, I can't do anything about that. And funnily enough, and I always like

to clarify this. When I see Ted speakers with American accents, I prefer it. Oh yes, because to me, no, going from an authority in America from like you know, Warton or Harvard or you know, No, it has magic. No, this is like I'm.

free made by Radi. Again, that's Joyful Book dot com, jo y f U l lBook dot com and you get your free Daily Wellness Guide made by Radi. So I developed a skill that I didn't know what I had used for when I met the monks and studied the Geeta and Eastern Wisdom, I was like, oh wow, I have a skill set that was ready to be

used for this when I'd never used it. I never used public speaking of drama before that for anything meaningful for me at least, and then I'd done that for ten years and then I made my first piece of content online. So but I made it in quiet because some of these things that you talk about here, and I'm pointing this out because we can go back to it after I answer your question. I was scared of looking stupid. You talk about making more mistakes theory versus

reality in the book. This is page forty, and you talk about looking stupid, feeling shame, being laughed at, and experiencing discomfort. I was scared of all of those things because now it was going beyond my community of people, like five to ten people who used to come and hear me speak. I had no idea what the online world would bring. I had never done that before. I didn't have any friends who'd ever created any online content,

so I couldn't check in with someone. I didn't have a coach, and so I was kind of doing it in quiet. And I think what was beautiful about that is I got to really construct my own voice that was authentic to who I was, and was just genuine to who I was. So my earliest videos are half spoken half spoken word because I loved rap music growing up. So there's you'll hear lazy rhymes, you'll hear words that cascade together, and it's inspired by what I loved as

a teenager. The visuals were I've always been into art and design, and so that was very easy for me. I love aesthetics, I love visuals, I love feelings and experiences. So I edited all my own videos. Granted, the editing was sloppy because of cuts and sound, which I didn't know well, but it was still what was natural to me. And then when I put out my first piece of video, the first people to react with the people I knew, and they were all like, Jay, you talked too fast,

the music's too loud. Well, we don't think this point is that great, And it was all negative feedback, and I kept going because I was getting some joy from it.

So in the beginning it was that way, and I think I've tried to hold onto that as much as possible, because as the scale grew, the plethora of negativity or criticism or judgment got louder as well, and I started to look at it more seriously because now you're worried about perception and image and how you think people view you and whether people see your truth or they don't, and you can feel defensive. And I think where I've got to now is I still get affected by it.

I'm so not beyond getting affected by negative comments or challenging comments or criticisms, because my monk training is left me vulnerable at some points, because I have created a space in which to always allow advice to come in, because though that's seen as a mark of wanting to improve and wanting to be better, and I've had to learn to balance that with also knowing my intention. So what I've accepted is that the only thing I can control is my intention being aligned and pure to what

I believe. Not pure like in a godly way, I mean pure in what I believe. But the way my action is received will come with advice, feedback, and criticism. And all I can keep doing is keep refining my intention and hope that that will channel the effect of communication externally. And no matter how perfect ten it is, it will ever be perfect, and therefore there will always be criticism, no matter how phenomenal an idea it is or whatever may be. So that's me meandering around your

question too. That's how I'm dealing with it. I don't think that's a solution or a solve. It's how I'm mentally kind of constructing bridges and walkways to navigate. How stressful it is.

On the other and I guess we have the monkey. Yeah, just like we are social primates and anything that could lose status could get us excluded, and this is really problematic. I don't think either is really realistic for us as humans. I think we're always going to care about what other people think. And I think my goal is to say I want to care enough about other people's reactions to learn from them, but not so much that I feel pressure to conform to them.

And I think that's where I think you struggle when you hear feedback or advice that you start attaching to your identity.

So you know, you watch somebody you know take a really crappy photo and their thumb is in the frame, and you don't immediately think that person is incapable of being a decent photographer, Like that was a bad photo, right, It was literally a bad snapshot, and it's a snapshot of a bad snapshot, so it's a meta a bad snapshot.

flawed and that they're failing makes them a failure. But I think in our own self talk and our self assessment, we do so much of that, like I screwed this up, I am a screw up, and everyone else is going to know it.

is how we think learning happens. And I think so many of our beliefs around learning do come from school, and do come from even For me, learning happens in that I learn something, now I know it fully, and now that rule stands forever. And I think modern day

learning isn't that at all. Like I don't know any rules that have completely stood forever, and apart from obviously certain mathematical or scientific rules, of course, but most rules in business, most rules in marketing, most rules in sales, most rules in even a relationship. They change, they mold, they grow. And so I think that fixed approach is hard to shake because you were always at the end

of it. Well, you got the wrong answer. So it was always about the answer, and it was always about well, if you knew the rule, you would have got the right answer. And today we feel I'm not getting the right answer, so I must not know the right rule, but that we're not finding that. So however, and reflect on that and then guide us through the principle.

knowledge and skills is the world around you evolves. And I think what that leads a lot of people to do is to spend far too much time trying to get to the point of mastery before they ever really try something. You know, from the book, I saw this really clearly in examples of language learners. I mean, how many people do you know that just concluded in high school that they're incapable of mastering a foreign language? You Yeah, what languages did you take?

Sarah Maria has Boone and Ben Lewis, and they both concluded after high school that they were incapable of learning a foreign language. Sarah Maria could not make it through Spanish and her father speaks fluent Spanish. Benny, I think just had a disastrous experience with German, also with Irish. And what's amazing about the two of them is that combined they can speak a dozen languages fluently today a

dozen languages fluently conversationally. Even more so, they're polyglots. They're people who not only talk but think in multiple languages. They're effectively self taught, and they've picked it all up in their twenties, thirties, ever beyond. It's amazing. So what I wanted to know is what can we learn from them, not just about language learning because but about any kind

of learning, because they are professional learners. And my biggest takeaway from you know, talking to them and also juxtaposing what they do with the evidence, is that language classes are broken in a lot of schools because basically what happens is you learn a vocabulary and a bunch of rules of grammar, and then you're taught to more or less just write it down, and very few schools do extensive practice in speaking, which means that you never learn

to actually talk in the language, which means you're not using the language and you don't practice enough to really master it. What Sarah, Marie and Benny recommend is start speaking from day one. Literally the first day you're picking up a language, you start talking in it. And what will happen is you do that, is you're going to make loss of mistakes, but through using it, you're going

to start to internalize it. And in fact, one of the things we know from the research is when you make a mistake, you're more likely to remember the correct answer because it really sticks, like, oh wait, I screwed that up last time, let me now change it. So I think the broader lesson here is that to go all the way back to the diagram, I think a lot of people want to wait to use their knowledge until they've acquired it. Oh wow, it's not how learning happens.

The way learning happens is you got to use your knowledge as you're acquiring it, and that's how you build it. And that's a virtuous cycle.

teach whatever I'd learned. And there was no I didn't have any qualification to teach. I didn't I didn't understand it fully, but it was like it was so much more fun that way, and I allowed myself. I gave myself the permission to say, I'm just going to teach what I learned. I'm going to teach what I learn up until now. I don't have to speak beyond my level of realization or reflection. But I'm learning this. I'm fascinated by it. Let me share it.

you could go tinker with it. I would say, go teach a class in it, or get a group of people together who are also interested in learning it, and each of you take a module to teach the rest of the group, and that's when you're really going to internalize it and start to master it.

whatever it may be. And I find that, but we haven't created space for it to be okay to not know.

And it's really ironic that only the people who know the most often get to the point of feeling secure in that knowledge to be able to say, yeah, I have no clue, but let me let me do some research on that and come back to you.

ever thought about coming to a PhD program? And I don't know. I think part of the joy of learning is that every answer raises at least nine new questions, and I think that we close that off when when we expect people to always have an answer.

becoming destigmatized. I think the idea of finding a coach is so unless you're an athlete, it seems so far as an idea or as a thought process of how you approach things. I know there are executive coaches that have definitely kind of got into the zeitgeish, but still finding a coach is quite an alien approach. I find that people have. There's stigma there, there's confusion there, there's a lack of understanding of what is a coach? How

have you thought about it? Seeing as you've mentioned it a bunch of times and in the book and today.

to pursue further. I think where it starts to become a little uncomfortable is when you're an adult and you think that you should be able to teach yourself everything, or you want to be self reliant, not dependent on someone else. And I think that's that's a broken mental

model of a coach. A coach is actually I think a good coach is trying to work him or herself out of a job and say, obviously, I'm going to give you lots of advice and I'm going to try to help you improve, but at some point you should internalize the way that I look at your performance, the way that I think about helping you make progress, to the degree that you can figure out what would I

say like after this, and then apply that advice. And at that point you're probably ready for a new coach who has different knowledge and skills to share with you. And I think that's where I would start, is I would say, coaches are all around us, you know, going back to the asking for advice idea, right, you ask people for advice, you start to turn them into your coaches, and there's no reason why you can't formalize this. A

lot of and you're familiar with this. A lot of writers have writing groups where somebody's working out a manuscript and then you know four or five other writers are basically coaching them and trying to help them improve it. I don't think that should be limited to you know, it has to be my job, or it has to

be the hobby I'm trying to improve at. I think anything you want to you want to get better at, you could just ask for somebody to give you informal coaching and then you learn really quickly, is this person's perspective helpful to me in this domain?

to fifteen years ago, and I want to realign and reconnect with that, if that makes sense us. And so I think that is something which I've given myself personal time to do regularly, to refine, to realign, to reconnect. But to do it with someone else who can see beyond and maybe has had experience of two very opposite worlds and has traversed those parts may be really helpful. And so I think that's what I would be looking for, and so coaching would be the right modality for that.

about it. If you keep going around it in your own head, chances are you won't say as articulately as you would say to someone else because you wanted to make sense to them.

They're not giving the rousing halftime speech all the time or the pep talk. They're not always necessarily kicking you in the butt, you know, to get you to work harder or persist longer. I think what they're doing is is posing challenges and ideas for you that bring out a better version of you.

It's allowing you to discover that for yourself, which is needed for someone else to do that, because otherwise you're just stuck in your head saying I'm not that. I remember a coach years ago when I had left the monastery, I was working at Accenture in London, and he'd always say to me, you're an entrepreneur. Just from watching you, I can observe that you're an entrepreneur. And I'd be like, no, I'm not an entrepreneur. I don't want to be an entrepreneur.

And I said I would fight and debate that with him, I would give him all the reasons, and he said, Jay, one day you'll see. And now I look back and I think, wow, I was. That is exactly who I was, not in the in the way that it may be seen in the world, but the autonomy, the wanting of being artistic, being a leader, wanting to create, wanting to produce without with freedom and without restraint, like all of that quality of an entrepreneur. I think language is so

limiting too. It is yeah, right, yeah, you're.

finding the sweet spot between flawed and flawless? How do you allow yourself to release anything when you know it's going to be flawed and imperfect Because I think that that's the challenge right with the book, especially with social media less so it's it's short form and short terms, so there's it's easier to get to what you want

to get to. But with a book with a to with a obviously, as a professor, I mean, everything you're teaching, you know people are going to practice it for years potentially. How do you feel comfortable putting something out that's imperfect and incomplete.

me to take it. And after writing this whole chapter about what I've learned about being an imperfectionist, my lowest score was imperfectionism. So I am not fully recovered from perfectionism, and it's sometimes hard for me to release things. I think what's helped me is a couple of things. One the calibration of saying, okay, if it's something as big as a book, I mean, I'm aiming for a nine like this. I'm going to pour a lot of time

into it. Hopefully a lot of people are going to engage with it, and so I really want it to be as good as I'm capable of doing at that moment in my life. If it's a social media post, like I'm content with a six and some people might get angry at me, some people might misunderstand me. I'm definitely gonna learn something, and it's better to put out a bunch of potential sixes and hit some mates than

to post once a year. As somebody who cares a lot about both sharing knowledge and learning from other people's reactions to those you know, those posts, I think that's been really helpful. And I guess what I've realized through that is if you never put anything out into the world, then you're actually limiting your contribution. And I think when when psychologists study regret, it's pretty clear that in the short run, people are afraid of failing, but in the

long run, they're more afraid of failing to try. And that's that's kind of where I've I've come down, is I'd rather fail than fail to try it all.

didn't think of that. And so sharing it in some form, even if it's not the complete form, but sharing a talk based on one of the chapters, or sharing I often do that with podcasts, Like when I have an idea, I'm like, oh, let me just record a podcast episode about that and see what people have to think about it. And it's a great way of just experimenting and testing and seeing what part of it I didn't consider. Yes, because someone will consider it, And we don't see that

as part of the growth process. We see as separate. We see as I'm going to make something complete, people are going to have exactly the reaction I want to it, and that will be the success of it.

to sharing anything they've created. Is so many people limit themselves by saying I don't want to self promote.

of it. If you don't put that out in the world, you're depriving people of benefiting from what you poured your heart into. And that that to me, seems like a mistake.

the students I happened to meet in the classroom. I immediately I had a lab meeting later that day with a group of undergraduates and I told them I was going to do this, and they had a mutiny, like no, you cannot. You cannot write a book about somebody else's ideas. You need to write your own book, Like Nope, can't do it. I cannot do that. This is like I don't feel comfortable to it. I hardly even teach my

own research in the classroom. I want to. I want to share with you the knowledge that I've found most useful. Like I don't think my my research is like the most important thing for me to teach you. And they push back really hard, and they said, look, you have a responsibility if you've invested a lot of your own time and energy and you know in the work that you do, to share that more broadly and get it out there and see what people think of it. And

they basically held me hostage. They said, you're not leaving this lab meeting until you agree you will write your own book before you help somebody else do theirs. And eventually they logic bullied me into agreeing, and I kind of came around and said, Okay, this is what we do. We don't create knowledge for it to collect us in academic journals or for it to only be available to students who are lucky enough to get into an Ivy

League school. That's not right. I believe in democratizing knowledge, So yeah, I'm going to do This book came out a little bit beforehand. I send an email to my network just saying, hey, you know, I wrote this book. If you find it interesting or useful, would be really grateful if you would help spread the word. The responses were so lovely, but I got one email that kind of crushed me in the moment, and it was from an academic colleague who said, dear Adam, love the book,

hate this self promotion. This was my fear. And I thought about it and I ruminated about it, and then it hit me, this is not self promotion. It's idea of promotion. This is about the knowledge contained in the book. I went out of my way to site a bunch of, you know, a long list of researchers. Later I was told too many. I was trying to synthesize a body of knowledge and get it out there. And we have to be to a certain degree in the spotlight in

order to promote our work. And I think, you know, people want to connect to the author, the narrator, and so there's a I think an amount of self disclosure that's required, but self promotion that does not have to happen. And I looked at the book and I said, Okay, the main things I've shared about myself are mistakes I made, times I failed, and what I learned from those. So I feel okay saying this was idea promotion, not self promotion.

And that's for me the litmus test ever since. So that I guess that's how I landed at that distinction.

And for me, when I wrote Think like a Monk, which was my first book, the biggest thing I was trying to do, and what I learned in my second book, which if I would have known in my first book, I would have done this is kind of explain this thought process where I tried to do it intuitively in how I shared it, as opposed to explicitly spelled it out, whereas now I'm much better at explicitly spelling out what I'm doing. I did that to honor all monk traditions.

So I studied lots of different monk traditions. I spoke to lots of different monks, and so it wasn't just the tradition I studied in. So that was very important to me because I believed that there were traditions beyond mind that would have values to share and important messages to share. The other thing that I tried to do in the book was I definitely have always wanted to make ancient wisdom accessible, practical, and relevant. That has always

been my mission. Because I'm trying to speak to the eighteen year old kid that I was in London before I got into spirituality and meditation and mindfulness. I'm not trying to to the person I am now or someone who's already learned a ton and so to me, to make it simple and accessible and relevant was my biggest goal and always has been, and that can often come with the critique of you're watering it down, you're oversimplifying it. This isn't the truth in the way it should be shared.

And the other thing was similar to you, and I love that you said that too. I never shared an enlightened experience in the book. All the experiences are mistakes there when meditation went wrong. Me being envious, they're me judging people, They're me wanting to get what the monks have without having done the work, like all the stories that the human experience of a kid from London who doesn't have the qualification to be where he is in

this space, trying to make sense of it. And and so the book was it wasn't think like me like that was in the book. It was called think like a monk, Like I'm not a monk anymore, and I want to show us how we can think like monks but not live like monks. And I think it was really interesting to me, just our again it comes from our preconceived notion on ideas, language having baggage and thoughts where people were just like, oh, but you're not a monk anymore, so how do you teach that? And this

isn't your life? And it was so interesting to me that we couldn't learn from things that the things I'd learned and gained as opposed to if you're not exactly that thing anymore, then you can't teach it.

that to yourself? Why should the wisdom of monks only be accessible to monks. That doesn't seem right.

it's fascinating. And there's a great book by Austin Cleon called Show Your Work yes, and I really like it, and I recommend that to anyone who's struggling with showing their work because it's exactly and I love the way

you've differentiated been self promotion and idea promotion. And I really hope that that stays with people who are listening and watching, because if you have an idea that you believe is worth sharing and worth helping people and supporting people, please don't hold onto it, like please don't hide it from the world, because I worry for us to only be exposed to the same three ideas that everyone's exposed to, because we hide away from all these other new ones.

and forget the source. That can happen inadvertently you hear an idea, you know, you don't necessarily track where you learned it, and then you know it kind of bubbles up a month later and you think you thought of it. I think that can happen. Ideas can get stolen on purpose,

They can get stolen by accident. What I always want to say to people who are afraid of their ideas getting stolen is if you have one big idea and you're afraid of putting it out there because you think someone else is going to steal it, you don't have a lot of ideas, and people who generally succeed with

ideas are people who are constantly generating ideas. And so what you should do is you should generate a whole portfolio of ideas, and then you're not identified with any one of them, you don't feel attached to just one of them, and then the risk goes way down.

or democratizing or public popularizing and publicizing. Yes, yeah, popularizing or publicizing an idea makes it better to not do that. You talk about the ego differently, but let's talk about in that category first of all. Like it's it's interesting how that scene as are holier than thou kind of approach, and I don't think either is holier. I just think that one's compassionate and and to me, that's more what

it is. Like I think when someone shares an idea about an experience that I could never have, to me, that's just compassion. It's their compassion to share with me.

aspirations with social good. And I don't think there's anything wrong with saying yeah, I want to promote this idea, both because I wanted to help other people and because I appreciate people respecting my knowledge and considering me a credible source. Like I actually think it would be problematic if you're like, yep, I care nothing about my own

reputation whatsoever. Like only character matters to me. And even if people think I'm an idiot and I'm dishonest and I lack integrity, like, as long as I know I'm a good person, that's good. Like that's just not functional in the social world. And so I think we should give people. This is another we need to give people the space to say yes, like I do want to be valued and appreciated for things that I think are important, and I want to add value to other people too.

because they make me feel good? Yes, I do, and I'm sure And at the same time, it comes from a place of wanting to do good in the world and wanting to spread ideas that will help people and serve people and support people and hopefully help them transform their own lives. And it comes from both of those places. I want to do things that make me feel good and do good in the world. Like I think that's I don't know any other way. Actually I don't either, Yeah, And I don't know how to live in a world.

If I only tried to do good to others, I would automatically feel good from that anyway. But if I was only to do things that were only good for me, I don't think I'd be satisfied either.

opposed to thinking that those character skills are set when you're young. That I found liberating and encouraging. So that was a surprise. I think that maybe a bigger surprise though, just as I think through the insights that I picked up as I was investigating, I think I had this image of people who, you know, not just to achieve greater things, but achieve the greatest things. I had this image that they just figured out how to make the

daily grind just tolerable. I think about Steph Curry just, you know, drilling over and over again to shoot as well as he does. I assumed that he just figured out how to not mind the monotony and the boredom and the exhaustion, and he would just power through it, and he had a superhuman ability to tolerate extreme amounts

of discomfort. Light bulb. While reading the research on deliberate practice, was like, it's not that motivating for a lot of people to just do the same activity repetitively over and over again. If you're Steph Curry shooting is fun like doing wind sprints and then trying to make baskets when you can hardly breathe, and doing that over and over again, like not anybody's like not my idea of joy, and

don't I don't think it's Stepf's either. And through the research I read, and through spending time with his trainer who designed this set of routines that had really elevated his game, I realized that deliberate play is a huge part of practice and we don't give it enough credit.

That you know, if your Steph, you play a game to see how many baskets you can make it in a minute and a half, and then you've got a target to shoot for and you're competing against yourself or you're competing against a clock, and all of a sudden, that supercharges your motivation, especially in the summer when nobody's you know, when you're not actually playing basketball games that really count. And I looked at that and thought, why do we

have to turn the daily grind into such a grind? Like, yes, there are times when we all have to push ourselves, but pushing yourself day after day is not a sustainable routine. And what we want to do is try to figure out how to redesign practice and skill development so that there are you could break skills down into these enjoyable pieces and then make them more playful. You mentioned Dan Coyle.

I love the Culture Code, and one of my favorite ideas that he wrote about was the difference between shallow fun and deep fund. I think shallow fun is gamification. It's tricking people into enjoying practice even though they don't really like it, because there's a carrot that's being dangled at the end. I think the deep fund is about saying we want to actually take the process of learning itself and make it enjoyable. And so, you know, the stuff example is a great one, but it's easy to

think about that in basketball. Evelyn Glenny are percussionist saying like, let me figure out if I could harmonize bach on a snare drum, Like, what a cool way to make learning percussion playful. And I think that that was a big aha for me. I think that I had come to see play as a reward for finishing my to do list and mastering a skill, and now I realize it's got to be on the to do list and it's got to be part of learning a skill.

Everything you'd want to practice through a mindfulness practice, And what the mind would do is I'd find a stone for today, and I'd find a stone for tomorrow so that I didn't have to do the same activity tomorrow. Because we want to make things easier mentally, and we're always trying to cheat the system or you know, break the game. So my mind would do that very naturally.

I'd find two stones of all right, I saw that one where that is behind that tree to today, I'll pick this one tomorrow, found one anyway, and then we'd get to the next day and the teacher would say, all right, today, we'd to find a petal like and they're just switched it up on you, and you'd laugh at your own mind, like you'd find it hilarious that your mind was trying to gain the system. But the monks are too, you know, already one step ahead of you.

They already know that built it exactly. And so I think things like that where learning to laugh at yourself brought play. When you saw the monkey mind, as you mentioned earlier, you laughed at it. You didn't you went harsh on yourself. You didn't if you saw a monkey. And I've seen monkeys do this in India, steal people's sunglasses, cut bags if you're holding it to grab fruit. Yeah, dieco stealing. I've seen them steal credit cards, like out

of people's hands if they're paying for something. You don't look at it and go what an idiot? Like what's wrong with you? You just think, oh, monkeys and you just laugh. And that's partly what the mind is like, Like it's it's funny to watch the flawed mind, uh and not take it so seriously and recognize that it's just how it's built and how it's how it acts.

Just do your service. Like it wasn't seen with as much like kind of pain and stress because they understood it's hard. They get that, like they know what the mind is going to do, and so why would they react to it with this like very serious and kind of imprisoned undertone rather than like, yeah, it's going to be there, just do it. I like that idea of just just do it anyway. It's going to be there, do it anyway, like okay. So you might feel you have too much of an ego to give a talk,

do it anyway and be aware of it. Right, be aware of something and do it anyway is far better than wait till you overcome your ego to do something like that, you'll be waiting for the rest of your life. It will never disappear, and that's just ego could be anything obviously, like envy or any of the things you mentioned.

But on top of all of that, it's packed with great stories, case studies, science and research to back it all up. And in Adam's signature style of making it fun, that the natural humor that always comes through. But thank you for doing this, And I wanted to ask you them. Is there anything you haven't shared either from the book and that's come in your mind and heart that you're like, Yeah, I really want people to know this or share this, and they may not be, but I want to give you the flow.

important or more important than deliberate practice for growth. The other two that I was just starting to think about, where that when you get stuck, you often have to move back to move forward. That before people leap in a scale, they have to dip. That was not ha that I did not have before.

gave that up very naturally. But I saw that as I grow older, people who'd studied something, especially something I had friends who would become lawyers or doctors, but then didn't enjoy it or didn't see that as their path directly even and having to pivot from that was so hard because it worked so hard to achieve something that is rare and hard and difficult.

law school. I always want to say to them, listen, I understand that you're already down this path, like you've done the pre med thing, or you're already, Like, you know, you're already in the program, But what's worse realizing that you wasted the last two years are going on to

waste the next twenty. It's not a hard calculus. And so I think maybe the antidote to sun costs is opportunity cost to say, yeah, you know what, you have already invested a whole bunch in this, But think about all the growth and all the joy that you're giving up on if you don't shift gears.

I fast forwarded twenty years and I asked myself, would I be happy doing what I see other people doing twenty years ahead of me? And the answer was no. And so I was like, well, then anything will be better than this, because if the answer is no, and It's not that they had bad jobs so they weren't happy. It's that I wouldn't be happy doing what they were doing twenty years from then, and so if you're not,

then you can't keep following the same path. Adam, I actually have two more questions from you that I just saw my notes that I actually don't want to miss asking these to you. This comes from part three, systems of Opportunity, Opening Doors and Windows, and I are these two questions that I think are really interesting. We talked about certain challenges of our school system and what we find wrong, but this was the interesting part for me. Do you believe children should be able to choose what

they study? I think it's a really fascinating concept. One of my friends runs schools where kids do get to choose. It's private, and I'm always fascinated by this idea of we've gone from living in a world that kids had no choice, we naturally swing to the other side of the pendulum where we want to give kids all choice. What did you discover?

way that maybe gets the best of both worlds. So I think it's potentially helpful for students to have choices within constraints. For example, so you ask, if you're an elementary school teacher, you ask kids to read thirty minutes a night, but they get to pick the book. I think that's the kind of choice we're looking for early on. I think later, probably in high school, every kid should take some math, but I don't think everyone needs to take trig Trigonometry has never been useful in my life.

In a heartbeat, I would throw out the Trigg curriculum and replace it with statistics, which I think actually is useful for how people think and what they do in the world.

of experiments I think. But what I would say is like within I mean, colleges are much better at this right saying there's a math requirement, but we give you a menu of options and you can choose within that. Nobody wants to go to a restaurant and have a menu with a thousand options, but if they kind of know what they like, they can say I can look at that category, I can choose within it, And I think that's where I would want choice to land. For kids at different levels.

have been really hard for someone I don't know. How would you be better at spotting hidden potential in schools and in young people earlier on, so that we can kind of hopefully better guide and coach people as opposed to have them become pre meds or complete a career and then having to pivot.

get to know kids. I love the research and looping that I wrote about in the chapter on what we can learn from countries like Finland and Estonia, But even here in the US there's strong ev e it's from multiple states with millions of students in elementary and middle school that if they just happened to have the same teacher for two years in a row, they achieve more

gains in math and rating, which is remarkable. And I know there are tons of parents who are afraid of this idea, like what if my kid gets stuck with Professor Snape for two years instead of one that's the end of the world. It turns out that not only is it good for kids to have the same teacher for multiple years, but that when kids are struggling and teachers are struggling, they actually benefit more from the extended relationship. And I don't think it's hard to unpack why this is.

I think when you know, when a teacher moves up with a student, they don't lose all this information in the handoff from one to the next. They understand the student's strengths and opportunities for growth. They also have seen this the distance that the student has traveled. And so instead of just saying, well, like a new teacher, well that student didn't shine in math, to say, wow, that student was really behind in math and now is right on track with the class. I think there's some hidden

potential there. I think every school on earth should let kids have the same teacher for multiple years. And I think it's not a huge effect in the data, but I think it's a meaningful one.

way it works. Like the practices that my monk teachers created for me were very different from what they created for other students, because it was all about specific learning and specific growth, and so some of the practices I did were not normal for others, and some of the practices other people did were not normal for me, because you trusted that your teacher was getting to know you better and therefore would create plans, whether some of that

included travel. For example, I would be asked to travel back more to London to teach while I was a monk, because they saw that that would be a useful skill set for me, that would be a useful experience for me of me going back to the country I was from and having to connect there, and that wasn't part

of it everyone else's training. And so I've always been a fan since my training in that way of having the same teacher, and even till this day, I still go back to the same monk teacher who knows me much better and now he has like so much data on me because you've known me since I was eighteen years old, and so he has eighteen years of insight of knowing me, and many of those years living together, where his ability to say, oh my gosh, do you remember when you used to be like this and this

challenge would trip you up? And look at you now, and just that context is so useful to hear from a student, like you're saying, like whether it's hey, you know, you were struggling with math last year and last year got C and this year got B. But I actually noticed that, you know whatever, I think it's huge. I actually think it's huge.

it's not just choice as well. It's not just like, hey, choose what you want. Yeah, it's beautiful. Thank you so much, Adam. This has been amazing, Thanks to you. Always a joy. I love how our conversations go from what's wrong with the school system to why we're not idea promoting enough all the way through to you know, how do we choose what we need to work on? What is the weakness? What are imperfections? And again it's all inside this book

called Hidden Potential The Science of Achieving Greater Things. Highly recommend it from Adam. Will put the link in the comments and the caption for you to get it. Thank you so much, Adam for doing this. I appreciate you.