Ep511 - David DeSteno | Emotional Success: The Power of Gratitude
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Welcome to the Talks at Google podcast, where great minds meet. I'm James, bringing you this week's episode with neuroscientist David De Stano. Talks at Google brings the world's most influential thinkers, creators, makers, and doers all to one place. Every episode is taken from a video that could be seen at youtube.com forward slash talks at Google.

David De Stano visits Google to discuss his book, "Emotional Success: The Power of Gratitude, Compassion, and Pride." The ability to persevere against all odds is often recognized as the key to success. But how can grit be cultivated and sustained?

In this book, David DeStano reveals that the most powerful tools we can draw upon to achieve our toughest goals are not willpower or self-denial, but are pro-social emotions: gratitude, compassion, and pride. This undervalued toolkit evolved specifically to help us resist immediate temptations in favor of long-term gains.

Destano breaks down the long overlooked mechanisms of perseverance built into our brains and shows how we can work with our emotions instead of denying them to achieve our goals. And he shows how we can do it with greater ease and deeper satisfaction than we would have thought possible. Originally published in February of 2018, here is David Destano, Emotional Success, The Power of Gratitude. Hi everybody. Thanks.

I'm pretty sure you can hear me. The sound guys are working on it, so that's great. Thanks for having me here. Today, I want to start by just asking what seems to be a simple question, and that is what underlies success? What allows us to succeed academically and professionally, to have financial security, to eat right, exercise and be healthy, to have good relationships?

What's the key? Well, it's not very often that you can find a magic bullet, but in this case, you can. Self-control, the ability to delay gratification, to value the future more than the present is what matters. And there's lots of research that attests to this, but in one way or another, it kind of all derives from what is arguably one of the most famous experiments in 20th century psychology. And that is Walter Mischel's, "The Marshmallow Test." And most of you probably know what this is, but in case you don't, let me tell you quickly.

So Michelle would take four-year-olds and he would put a marshmallow down in front of me and say, you can eat this now, but if you wait until I come back 15 minutes from now, you can have two.

And now this is a child-friendly version of a dilemma that we all face, something that economists call intertemporal choice, which is basically decisions that have different consequences as time unfolds. And I like to kind of explain this with a reference to Aesop's fable of the ant and the grasshopper. If you remember the story, it was a beautiful summer. The grasshopper spent its time dancing and frolicking while the ant went to the fields and toiled to put away food for the winter. When the winter came,

The ant had a lot of food. The grasshopper was out of luck and starved. And so what you're seeing is we're contrasting here a desire for pleasure in the moment versus a willingness to sacrifice in the moment for larger pleasures and gains down the line. Now,

The problem for us humans is we tend to discount the value of the future. In some ways, this makes good sense. A bird in the hand can certainly be worth more than two in the bush sometimes. But we tend to do it a bit excessively. We do it so much, especially as our world has become a more certain place, that we tend to make very seemingly irrational decisions.

Now, what Michelle found is that the kids who had self-control were able to stop and not gobble the marshmallow, but wait. Over time, had much better outcomes, better grades, higher SATs, better relationships. Since that time, lots of people have tied the ability to delay gratification and to persevere in the face of challenges to having better savings for retirement, less credit card debt, lower obesity, less addictive behaviors, less impulsivity in shopping and consumerism.

And so that raises an important question for us, right? If self-control is so important, how are we supposed to obtain it? How do we get more of it? Now here, um,

Michelle's view is still kind of the one that's held commonly both by the lay public and scientists alike. And it's that emotions are the bane of self-control, right? These emotions have to be overruled by kind of cool, cognitive, well-planned thoughts and willpower for gonna succeed.

And if you go to your local Barnes and Noble or Amazon, you will find the shelves filled with bestsellers that extoll just this idea. So all of these books in one way or another urge people to use

willpower or other cognitive strategies involving executive function, which is that part of your mind that allows you to kind of plan and reason yourself into developing certain habits and ways of dealing with temptations. But you know an idea has really entered the zeitgeist not when you see it,

in Barnes & Noble, but when you see it on Sesame Street. And so in 2013, the folks there who are very dedicated to child education realized that teaching kids self-control and grit was an important part of them being successful. And so they thought, who better to teach this than the walking, talking, it himself, Cookie Monster? And so in 2013, Cookie still said, me want cookie, but they added something. And now he said, but me wait.

And so for that whole season, we saw Cookie teach kids how to use willpower to avoid their temptations. And he would distract himself by creating strategies like pretending the thing he wanted, my favorite was the cookie, was stinky fish. Or he would develop all kinds of strategies because he knew his willpower would probably fail. But unlike Cookie...

What happens for most of us, he was successful. What happens for most of us is we're not as often as we'd like. And what the scientific research shows is that willpower can work, but it tends to be rather fragile. Kathleen Vose, who's at the University of Minnesota and kind of one of the world's leading experts on self-control, followed people for weeks in their daily lives with like, you know, beepers and

Boy, I sound old beepers. Smartphones where they could actually see what temptations people were facing and how they dealt with them. And what she found is that one out of more than one out of every six times people tried to resist a temptation and stick to their goals, you know, to go to the gym or not overeat or not overspend or work hard rather than watch TV, they failed.

And for goals that are even more important to us, the stats are even worse. So 8% of New Year's resolutions are kept till year's end. 25% fail right now in the second week of January.

And so you're not alone if you're one of these. And so my question as a scientist is, if we've been using science for the past 20 years to try and help people develop self-control, develop grit, which is the ability to kind of persevere in the face of challenges to achieve your long-term goals,

then why are we still so bad? Why is Angela Duckworth, who's one of the discoverers and major proponents of grit has said, is it, why is it that no one really knows how to cultivate self-control and grit in a way that endures?

And I think it's because when we faced a fork in the road between deciding to use strategies based on reason and willpower and ones based on emotion, we chose the wrong one. And because we did that, we've kind of set ourselves up for a lot of failure and a lot of frustration.

Let me tell you why I think that. One thing we know about willpower is it tends to be difficult to maintain, not because it's some finite resource, but because every time you're trying to resist a temptation to do something fun, your brain interprets that as effort because it's discounting the value of the future goal. And over time,

As it keeps becoming harder and harder to do something and harder to maintain your focus, it feels more effortful. And so what we know is that when you're trying to resist temptations continuously, over time, you're going to fail. And the more often you try it, the more likely you will fail without some type of respite in between. You may say, well, but I know people who have good self-control and willpower.

Here what the research shows is their self-control isn't any better than the rest of us. The people who we think have really good self-control and willpower, the reason they succeed is because they structure their lives so as not to come in contact with temptation in the first place.

It's actually as if they know that willpower is gonna fail. And so they're smart enough to structure their life so that they can avoid that temptation and appear like they're in good control of their desires. But perhaps potentially worse than willpower being weak is that reason itself and how we set our goals and decide what we're gonna do is an objective that can actually be really biased. So let me give you an example of what I mean by this. One thing we study in my lab is cheating.

And so a typical experiment we do is we'll bring people in and we say, okay, look, there are two tasks that need to be done. A short and fun one involving a photo hunt takes about 10 minutes. A really long onerous one that takes about 45 minutes doing logic problems and things that most of our students don't like to do. Here's a virtual coin flipper.

Why is it virtual? So I can control what comes up on it. If it's heads, you're going to do the short, fun photo hunt. If it's tails, you're going to do this long, onerous problem. And that guy who was sitting out in the hall next to you, he's going to get stuck doing whatever one you don't do. And then we leave them alone. And they're on hidden video, which they don't know, of course. What do you think they do? They cheat. What percentage of people cheat? Close. 90%.

90% of people cheat. And by cheat, I mean they either don't use the virtual flipper and just say, you know, go and say, I got, you know, I flipped it and I got the easy task. Or they flip it once it comes up with the answer they don't want and they flip it again to try and see what they're going to get. Now, the interesting thing here is if you ask people, if you were in this situation and you didn't flip,

Is that wrong? It's the only time in my life I get unanimous data. 100% of people say to not flip the coin, to cheat on this task would be wrong. Yet 90% of them do. Now I'm not running this outside of the prison. So the question is, why is it the case that most people just like you and me kind of give in to our temptations here?

Well, at the end of the experiment, we asked them, how fairly did you act, these 90% who cheated? And this is a scale of one to seven. So the higher numbers basically mean you acted more fairly. And people say, you know, they're above the midpoint. I'm like, I did okay. If you then run the experiment again, except this time people are watching someone else cheat, right? Suddenly it's not as fair.

Right. So if you do it, it's bad. If I do this exact same thing, it's more fair. Okay. And this is hypocrisy, plain and simple. Now, when I talk about people say, oh, well, you know what happened? It's like their emotions got the best of them. Their willpower wasn't strong enough to override their desire to not want to do this awful task.

That's not what it was. The reason we know is when we ran the experiment a third time, we put people under what's called a cognitive load, which is a way to kind of occupy their ability to kind of engage in reason and rationalization. Basically, we're distracting them with a secondary task while they're deciding what they're doing. Here, when you ask them, how fairly did you act? Hypocrisy goes away. Okay. They realize that what they did, their cheating was

and just as bad as anybody else's. They don't give themselves leniency. And so what was leading to this was rationalization, right? Everybody has this immediate pang of guilt, but if we give you a minute to think about what you did or what you wanna do, you'll construct a story for why it was okay for you to do this, right? And people will say, "Oh, well, normally I wouldn't have done this, but you know, I had an appointment I couldn't be late for."

Or my favorite was the guy who said, well, I wouldn't have done this except, you know, the guy who was sitting out in the hall was going to get the next task. He looked like he was an engineering major. And I thought he would really like the harder problems. Right. And so you see what people are doing is they're rationalizing themselves into doing something that goes against their own moral code. What's the problem here? It means that.

Many times when we're trying to resist a goal to watch TV instead of go to the gym, to not work hard, to throw in the towel on something, we can talk ourselves into why that's good. We'll often reason ourselves into why it's okay for us to do this, why it's okay for me to buy the new iPhone instead of put money into retirement because I deserve it. And if we can reason ourselves into this, then we're never going to use willpower in the first place.

Finally, the last reason I think reason and willpower are the wrong way to go about trying to foster our goals and our long-term success is they actually can be detrimental. So when those of you have struggled with trying to achieve a goal and trying to use willpower to get it, you can feel this tension that you often have.

So this is work done by Greg Miller, who's a psychologist at Northwestern University. And what he found is he looked at kids who were from disadvantaged backgrounds and who had self-control and were trying to resist temptations, right? To have grit and succeed.

And what he found is that, yeah, those who had higher self-control based on willpower and trying to force themselves to do these things did succeed more, but it came at a cost, right? These kids also showed premature aging of their immune cells because of the stress involved. And so, yeah, they're succeeding, but they're not gonna be around as long to enjoy it. And it's because trying to always fight a desire is putting your body under an intense amount of stress. And so what I wanna convince you of today is that

Emotions aren't the problem. Emotions don't always lead to impatience. Sure, there are some. There are things like anger that will lead you to strike out. There are things like lust and desire that may make you act for immediate gratification. But there are other emotions that do different things.

Things like gratitude, compassion, and an authentic feeling of pride, not arrogance or hubris. And if you think about it, why these? These are the emotions that underlie social living. These are the emotions that make us willing to invest in other people that cost themselves.

to ourselves. When I feel grateful, I'm willing to pay somebody back and spend a lot of time to do that. If I feel compassion for somebody, I am willing to give them time, money, a shoulder to cry on, something that is maybe difficult for me in the moment, but will help them. If I feel proud of my abilities, I'm willing to work hard to develop them to help my team and myself succeed as part of it. I'm sorry. And so,

If I'm right, then what it means is that if you're feeling these emotions, it should make it easier for you to succeed in the marshmallow test. But I don't work with kids, I work with adults. And most adults don't like marshmallows, but they do like cold hard cash.

And so we ran the experiment that's an adult version of the marshmallow test in this way. We brought people in and we gave them, at first we asked them to describe a time they felt very grateful, they felt very happy, or they're just, you know, something about their daily life that was kind of neutral. We then had them complete a bunch of questions that were of the form, you can have X dollars now or Y dollars in Z days where Y was always greater than X.

and Z varied over weeks to months. So it's kind of like, would you want one marshmallow now or two marshmallows in three days? Except the typical question was, would you rather have $35 now or $75 in three weeks? And to make it interesting for people, we told them we'd pick one of their many responses and we'd honor it. So if you said you wanted a $35 now, we'd hand you $35. If you said I'd like 65 or 75 in three weeks, we'd mail you the check.

Now from this, we could count and determine how much people devalue or discount the value of the future. And what you're seeing here is things graphed as annual discount factors. And one way to understand what that means

is an annual discount factor of 0.15 means people think that $100 in a year is worth $15 today. Or another way of saying that is if I gave you $15 today, you'd forego getting $100 in a year, which I don't know about you, but unless you need that $15 to survive, the ability to kind of quintuple your money in a year's time, given what the banks are paying is pretty good.

But people were pretty impatient, right? People who were feeling nothing in particular had a discount factor of 0.17, right? They'd say, I see $100 in years worth $17 now, give me $17 now, you can forget about that $100 in a year. What about people who were feeling grateful? Here we doubled their level of self-control.

These people discounted the value of the future less. For them, $100 a year from now was worth $30, which meant if I gave them the same deal as most people, would you take $17 to forego it? They wouldn't take it. Now, just to show you that it's not just about feeling good, happy people were no different than people who were feeling neutral, right? There's something intrinsically motivating about valuing the future, willing to sacrifice about these social emotions that bind us together like gratitude.

And we followed, we ran the experiment again, but we followed people for three weeks in their daily life and measuring every day how much gratitude they felt. And what we found is you can see here, the people who felt the mean level of gratitude and one in standard deviation above and below. And what you see is a nice linear function. The more gratitude you feel in life, the more patient you are. At the end of those three weeks, we gave them a similar financial task to do. So experiencing these emotions are kind of like booster shots.

of self-control, they make you more patient, they make you value the future more, they make you willing to wait for the bigger cash, the bigger marshmallow to not eat the broccoli so that... I mean to eat the broccoli so that you can be healthy instead of the French fries when you see your doctor next. How about pride?

Well, if I'm right, then pride should also increase the value of the future. But we wanted to look at this in terms of a measure that people typically look at in terms of grit, which is perseverance, right? Will pride make people persevere more on tasks that are difficult? Now, I know what you're thinking, probably pride?

Gratitude, compassion, I kind of get. Where does pride fit in? By pride, I'm not meaning an arrogant, hubristic sense of pride, thinking you have skills that you don't have. And I'm not trying to be political. He's just the biggest example right now. But there are certainly Democrats who fit this bill as much as Republicans. But what I mean by pride is actually having pride in skills that you have worked hard to develop and others recognize in you for working hard to develop. So we ran an experiment where we brought people in

And we had them do this task on what we called visual spatial ability. It's kind of like mental rotation and these things. And then we gave them feedback, sorry, in the first condition, we didn't give them any feedback. And then we gave them a second task, which he said is related to your visual spatial ability. It's really hard and difficult. Please work on it as long as you can.

In a second condition, we gave them feedback on how they did on the first test, the first visual spatial test. We said, oh, you did very well. You scored in the 94th percentile. We showed them what that meant and then let them do another task. But in the third condition,

we not only let them know they did well, but we made them feel proud of this ability. Because let's face it, most people don't really care about their visual spatial ability. And so we wanted to make them feel proud. And so what we told them is, look, this is a really important skill. I mean, you've done really well. The experimenter gave them kind of a pat on the back and kind of non-verbals that this is really good. We then compared how long they worked on these tasks.

And what you found is there were no difference between the folks who didn't get any feedback and people who were told that they did okay on the task.

But the people who were made to feel proud persevered for 40% longer on that next difficult task. Why? Because the pride pushes them to value the goal of getting better at something that those around you or you yourself value, right? It gave them the grit to keep going, to keep studying, to keep working, to keep exercising, whatever it may be.

Compassion works similarly. You know, when I was researching this book on self-control, I thought I need to go straight to the top. Who knows more about self-control than Buddhist monks? Probably not anybody, right? A lot of Buddhism is about detachment from desire. And so a friend of mine is a high ranking Buddhist Lama. And he told me that when monks first take their vows,

to be chased and to not gamble and to not drink. They fail a lot, just like the rest of us, because they're relying on willpower to do it. But over time through meditation, it begins to unleash this feeling of compassion in them. And when they feel compassion, suddenly it becomes very easy. Suddenly the temptations fall away. Now, if you...

Read the New York Times or the Atlantic. You're going to hear that, you know, meditation does all these great things for you. It lowers your blood pressure. It increases your creativity, increases your memory. All those are true things.

That's not why it was created, right? It was created basically to help end suffering both for yourself and for other people, to make people more altruistic. And so to show you that it actually can evoke compassion and make people willing to engage in self-control, we wanted to run an experiment where we brought people in for eight weeks, 39 people from the Boston area.

and they were gonna take part in a meditation experiment. And they were either put on a wait list, so they didn't meditate or they came in once a week to train and be instructed by a Buddhist Lama and were given MP3s to take home and practice. At the end of those three weeks, we had them come to our lab. We told them, "We're gonna do memory tests on you."

That really wasn't true. When they came in, the true experiment happened in the lab's waiting room, right? So there were three chairs in the lab's waiting room. Two were occupied by actors, people who worked for us. And so the subject would come in and they would, of course, sit down in the third chair.

A few minutes later, another actor, actress actually came in and she was on crutches. She had her foot in one of those ankle boots you wear when your foot is broken. She's coming down the hall and she's wincing in pain. She walks into the room. The two people who are there in the chairs already ignore her. We told them, you know, thumb your cell phones,

just don't pay any mind. The question then was what would the subject actually do? Now, this is a situation where it's known to make it very hard to help as we call bystander situation. And you see it unfortunately on the streets a lot. I mean, there are people who there could be a homeless individual who looks like they're in need and everybody's just walking by and that makes it easier for everybody else to just walk by 'cause if nobody's helping this person, why should I? And so we set up a similar situation.

What would the person who was meditating for eight weeks or not do and so what we find is a pretty large effect So among those who didn't meditate right three out of nineteen Decided that they would get up sacrifice their own comfort to give this chair to relieve somebody else's discomfort We boosted that to 50% after eight weeks of meditation now

Now, this is a small sample, so we wanted to run it again. We also were interested in scalability, right? And the problem with this is, yeah, meditation can work this way, but lots of people don't have access to a Buddhist Lama or the time or money to do this.

And so we partnered with Headspace, which was an app for your smartphone. The reason we use Headspace is Andy Puddicombe actually has a lot of monastic training. And so we figured he knew what he was doing. So around the experiment again, we had 56 people. We had them for three weeks do either Headspace or Lumosity. It was billed as a cognitive training course. And then we had them do the same experiment in the lab.

And we found a similar effect. That is people in the control condition, four out of 29 were willing to get up and help this other person versus 10 out of 27. So again, a fairly large boost in the people who are willing to sacrifice their own comfort to help somebody else.

How does that relate to self-control? Well, we wanted to look at self-control in a different domain, and that is the domain of aggression, right? Sometimes when you get angry at people, you want to lash out at them, and that may not be a good strategy for a number of reasons, and it takes self-control to not do that. So we brought 46 people into the study. We had them, again, do headspace. Half of them do headspace.

for three weeks. And then I'm gonna skip talking about this Stroop part of the experiment. We had them do this experiment where they thought they were gonna prepare speeches for each other. So you would prepare a speech, then you would deliver it to somebody else via video. Of course, the other person was actually an actor who worked for us.

And so you would write your little speech about your life goals and you would give it to this person and that person's job was to give you feedback. And basically that person would say, basically, this is terrible. I can't believe these are your goals.

what are you doing, right? And so this was a strategy, a paradigm developed by Tom Denson. And he's shown that it reliably evokes anger and frustration in people, both in what they say and in terms of their blood pressure and their heart rate and lots of other things. And so after we did this, we told them, okay, now we're moving to a

taste perception study where we want you to prepare taste samples for each other and we're going to measure your taste acuity. Today we're doing hot sauce samples. And so we gave them this evil bottle of hot sauce, like it was labeled really hot. And we told them, okay, you have to prepare the sample for each other. And the amount that you put in the cup will be placed in its entirety in the person's mouth.

Now, again, this wasn't developed by us. This is another strategy that you use in the lab to understand aggression. The person doesn't actually drink it, but it's actually a way of people know this is going to cause pain. They can control how much they're gonna do. And you can get a measure of that without actually causing any pain. So what do we see?

So people who didn't meditate, they were kind of angry and they poured seven grams of hot sauce into this cup. Now, when they're not angry, so we've done this experiment where people aren't angry, the average amount people pour in is about one to two grams 'cause they know they've got to put something in there for the taste sample. Seven's a lot.

What happened to the people who meditated? Okay, they had a lot more self-control. They poured a lot less. Yes, they were angry. They said they were angry, but they were more able to control their impulses to lash out. And ultimately, this is another way of valuing the future because what happens when you lash out is you tend to engage in tit-for-tat escalations of vile. So that's just to show you that, you know, meditation is one way to kind of boost these emotions.

Compassion beyond that has been shown. More often people feel compassion both for others and themselves has been tied to better performance on the job and in school, more exercise, healthier eating, lower consumerism, less tobacco and alcohol use. Again, we're seeing the more often you experience these emotions leading to greater success.

Now, the benefit of using emotional strategies is they don't work from the top down. We're not always reminding ourselves, oh, resist this goal. I mean, sorry, resist this temptation so you can achieve your goal. They're not stressful. There's no fight. They work from the bottom up. By making us value the future more, they make us value the future more.

they ease us into persevering toward it. If we value our future goals more, it's not a struggle to want to pursue them and to be willing to accept sacrifices to obtain them. And so, yeah, there are different ways to get there. There are cognitive strategies like willpower and pre-commitment and planning and distraction, but there are emotional strategies. And for the reasons I've told you, I think the emotional strategies are

are the stronger ones. But there's one last benefit I wanna tell you about before I end. And that is these, using these pro-social emotions actually addresses another big problem of modern life, which is the plague of loneliness. Consider this in 1985, 80% of Americans reported that they had at least one friend that they could rely on and share things with and felt comfortable with.

By 2005, that had dropped to 57%. Today, 53% of Americans regularly report that they feel lonely, especially at work in their professional lives. And one thing we know from work by John Cassioppo, the psychologist at University of Chicago, is that loneliness is as bad for you as is smoking. It will lower your life expectancy to the same extent. It is a detriment to your psychological wellbeing and to your physical health because of the stress that it causes.

Now, when you think about how people pursue their goals, I think the way we tend to pursue them is in a very kind of atomistic individualized ways. We're putting our nose to the grindstone. We're just focused on what we wanna do and we're studying hard, we're working hard and we're not thinking about our social connection. So there's a famous statistic related to grit out there, which says that people

kids who scored higher on the grit scale actually performed better in high stakes things, one being here the spelling bee, national spelling bee. But there's a cautionary element in there too. If you look at the final round of data, I'm sorry, the final round, who won in the final round, who performed well, once you can stroll for the kids' verbal IQs, grit didn't predict anything. Well, it did predict one thing. And that one thing was spending more time drilling and studying.

And what that suggests is not that grit is bad. Having grit, valuing our goals, having a passion to pursue them is hugely important. I don't mean to suggest it's not, but there are lots of ways that you can be gritty. You can do it in a way that's nose to the grindstone isolation, or you can do it by cultivating these moral emotions, which I think will solve a problem. Because when you cultivate these emotions,

What they tend to do is increase your social network. So one thing we know about people who are high in this trait called conscientiousness, which is kind of being focused on always doing the right thing, monitoring what's going on, being detailed, oriented, using willpower to make sure you do the right thing. And it's almost perfectly correlated with grit. So those who are high in conscientiousness are high in grit. These people do fail less because they're working hard. But when they fail...

the hit to their wellbeing is 120% greater than the rest of us. And the reason I think why that is, is because they don't have that social network to capture them when they fall.

Now, if you use these emotions to build your success, to help you persevere, you can't help but build those bonds, right? We have lots of other work that I'm not gonna talk about today that people who experience gratitude more often have better friendships, higher quality social lives. Compassion and warmth are one of the first things that we look for in who we want to be friends with and that our mind notices.

Pride, a true pride in your skills, not being an arrogant, but taking pride in your work and your abilities is very attractive. It makes other people want to work with you and even see you as a leader. So by cultivating these emotions, they not only help you achieve your own goals, they help you automatically build a social network around you. And if you think about it, it makes a lot of sense, right? Why did self-control evolve? Self-control didn't evolve to help you save for your 401k.

to exercise or even get a second marshmallow. Self-control evolved originally to help us with social connection, right? For millennia, 401ks, the whole 30, whatever it might be, they didn't exist.

What made humans successful was having good character, being fair, being honest, being generous, being willing to accept some sacrifice on your own to help other people. Having those bonds is what ensured success for most of our evolutionary history. And these were the emotions that underlied it.

So now what we can do is take these same emotions that made us willing to invest in other people and pivot their power to make us willing to cooperate with and help someone else who's very important to us. And that is our own future self.

And if you follow this route, right? What I like to say is it not only gives you grit, but grace, right? That is, it helps get rid of this dichotomy that David Brooks likes to talk about between resume virtues and eulogy virtues. Resume virtues are those that you need for your career. Eulogy ones are the ones that you wanna be remembered for.

By following this route, you're going to maximize both. And what that will do is ensure that you'll have a balanced and resilient success. And at the end of your life, when you look back, you're going to have less regrets. So thank you for coming and listening. And I'm happy to talk with you about any questions you might have.

Sure. Do you do any studies about maybe more negative emotions driving success, like being vindictive or anything like that? Ah, OK. I thought you'd say something else. So, yeah. So so if people say, should I be a nice guy or should I be kind of vindictive and out for myself to succeed? I say, well, it depends on your time frame.

So in the short run, being a jerk, being a cheater, being someone who will exploit other people's will quickly allow you to recruit resources. Over time, both in the workplace and in evolutionary models that people like Martin Novak, who's an evolutionary biologist at Harvard, have run, what we see is that individuals who are willing to...

be compassionate and trustworthy and gratitude and to share and cooperate honestly over time, garner the most resources. Because if you're a jerk, yes, in the short run, you can cheat people out of stuff and take credit for stuff and prosper. But over time, that reputation will come back to haunt you. Yeah.

I was just curious what you thought I was going to say and what you... Yeah, what I thought you were going to say is, are there negative emotions that are kind of moral emotions like guilt that would actually motivate you to behave in ways? And it's true. So if you're guilty, it will motivate you to have self-control. If you're worried about being embarrassed, it will motivate you to have self-control. But the problem is those are also very stressful emotions to experience. So guilt and shame and embarrassment...

have a role to play in the social world. They make us behave in certain ways as kind of a psychological kick in the pants, but they're not something that you want to cultivate regularly because it will be stressful to your body to do it, which is why I focus on these more positive ones. Hey there. So one question I had is, so you talk a lot about the importance of...

meditation, which inherently is about being present and sort of calming your mind and thinking about gratitude and compassion and pride is sort of like, how do you really sort of be in the moment with where you are and appreciate it and kind of, you know, have the different sort of emotions that go along with it. But also fundamentally, you talked a lot about the importance of goals and being future looking and utilizing the future as a means to manage how you think about

the present. Like there's a bit of tension there in terms of like, how much should you be

utilizing the future as a reference point and be like, I want to achieve this. I've decided I want to achieve it. I'm going to put it away for now and focus on the moment versus keep going back to the future as a way to kind of dictate how you live in the present. Could you just talk about that? Yeah, I think I'm, I'm, I'm, I've got what you're asking if I don't correct me. But so I, the beauty about these emotions, right? Is they, is they unlike kind of making the five year plan and always being focused on where am I, what am I doing?

is they simply give you patience in any realm. And they simply make it willing that whenever you're confronted with a decision, do I want to do something that is in line with my goals, whatever those goals may be, or do I wanna do something that is fun but detrimental to those goals? They increase the mind's value of the future goal and thereby reduce the tension and the fight that you're gonna engage in to try and make yourself pursue them.

But the beauty of them is you're not always having to think about the future. Simply feeling these emotions automatically recalibrates what you're willing to do. So as an example, when we make people feel grateful,

they're more willing to make decisions like financial decisions that have delayed returns that benefit themselves and everybody else. But at the same time, they're more likely to want to help people. They're more likely to be willing to make dietary choices that are healthy for them. And what it does is it kind of not only calms your desire for immediate gratification, but makes you non-consciously

So it's not like you're actually, you have to stop and say, okay, I want to work hard in this. I better be grateful of this so that I can work hard on this. It kind of just unfolds. And what do emotions do? They just shape what you're gonna do next without you having to think about it. And so I think cultivating these emotions allows you to behave in ways

that are more beneficial to your future without having to always consciously think about what those ways are. Does that make sense? - Yeah. - Yeah, okay.

Hi, do you have any suggestions for exercises other than meditation? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, right. So how do we do this? So for gratitude, it's pretty easy. I mean, what we do in our experience oftentimes is have people do gratitude, you know, journaling or gratitude diaries. You take five minutes a day every other day. Think about something you're grateful for. The trick, of course, is we all have three or four things that we're immensely grateful for.

And if you think about the same three or four things every day, they're gonna lose their power. And so what you have to do is think about, you know, the guy who gave you directions today, or the woman who gave you her seat on the subway, or somebody who helped you out here at your work at Google during the day. It doesn't have to be something that's amazingly you're grateful for. Even mild levels of gratitude do the same thing. Compassion, besides meditation, one thing that we know works is looking for links with other people. So we do other work where we bring people together

and we just have them find some common link. They like the same sports team. They like the same music. They have a friend in common, whatever it might be. Just simply knowing that you have a link with other people makes the mind more willing to feel compassion for that person. And so a way to do that on a daily basis is to stop and try and just every day put yourself in somebody's shoes and feel an emotion for them. The magic part about this is if I feel compassion

by trying to put myself in your shoes and perspective take and think what it's like and how I could help you, that compassion will bleed over and it will make me help my own future self and other people as well. It's like, if I'm grateful because Alan did something for me, our work shows that it also makes me much more likely to pay it forward and help the next person who's there. I mean, emotions, when you think about it, when you're frightened of something,

You're frightened and then you hear like a scary, you hear a creak in your house, you're like, oh, I'm afraid of that because they're setting the expectation for what you do next. If you're feeling gratitude or compassion, they set the expectation for what you're gonna do next, even if it's not related to what you're thinking about in the moment. Same thing for pride, don't take pride only in ultimately reaching your goal because that's a long time away. Take pride in kind of each little step along the way. Don't engage in self-criticism for not getting there sooner.

have kind of pride and self-compassion for yourself along the way. Those are some easy strategies to do. So gratitude, compassion, and pride are definitely positive emotions that all people feel. And my question is, how did you come up with this specific list? Because there are a lot more, humility, respect, trust, love, you name it. Yeah. So for me, these are the emotions, and I'm not saying these are the only ones, but these are the emotions that underlie

cooperation, right? Ultimately, what is human life about, human morality about? It's about cooperation. Why do we cooperate? It's because we can do more together than we can alone. And so these are the emotions that I call social emotions that exist only within the context of

of social interaction. I think love works the same way. I just think love's not as easy to do because you can't, it's harder to cultivate love on a daily basis for somebody you don't know. But love is a very powerful emotion. I mean, when you think about grit, what is grit? You know, people talk about, oh, the person who worked hard to get ahead as a CEO.

To me, people who have grit are, you know, the mom who works three jobs so she can support her kid in college or the grandfather who has emphysema, who's dragging the oxygen tank behind him to go see his grandchild play on the soccer field. I mean, to me, that's

where grit really comes from. It's a willingness to sacrifice. And I'm sure we can pivot it to our own success. And so I think these three emotions are some of the primary ones. I don't think, I mean, trust, respect, those things are hugely important. They're not really emotions. I think they play into it. And so I think these are some of the three strongest that are the most tractable, but I don't mean to say that they're the only ones.

Yeah, I think I was this side before. Well, anyone, either way. So you talked about the stress that somebody incurs by controlling their impulses and kind of even the long-term health implications of this. I'm thinking of the analogy of something like strength training where you lift a weight and over time you get better at it. It becomes easier to exert the same end goal. I was wondering, does that analogy not work in the case of...

The analogy works well in two ways. One is you're almost developing kind of a habit of doing this by cultivating these traits

it kind of shapes your way of looking at the world. And so suddenly you begin to look for things to be thankful for, or you automatically begin to look for links to other people and have compassion for them. So they happen more frequently, but they also happen more intensely. So there's work, not mine, where they look at people who are basically giving and paying back others.

And what they find is a simple act of giving to pay back others activates the reward center in the brain. So it actually is something that we perceive as rewarding to ourselves. And what they find is that the more often you do that for the same type of giving, the strength of that reward signal goes up. So basically it's intrinsic value to the brain goes up. And so it strengthens both in frequency and in intensity.

And one last thing I want to say about how we cultivate these. Within a work environment like Google or any corporation,

There's two ways that these emotions flow in networks I think is very important. One is like all emotions, they're catchy. So there's this thing called emotional contagion. So if you're afraid, that will kind of rub off on me. So if my coworker is feeling grateful, that gratefulness will kind of rub off on me. Same about their compassion. And so one, you can catch them from other people, but the more important way is they work reciprocally. So if I'm feeling compassionate toward you, it makes me more willing to help you with something that you're working on.

for which you will then feel grateful to me. And then because you're feeling grateful, you're more likely than to pay it forward to somebody else who will then feel compassion for you. And so you get a network that's continually reinforcing that makes not only the team collaborate more, but individuals willingness to work hard themselves goes up and their stress goes down.

Oh, sorry, I keep skipping you. - Oh yeah, I just wondering what your thoughts are about the dollar experiment and like accounting for need in that experiment. - You mean the one I had up here? - Yeah. - Yeah, so people always say, well, you know, if valuing the future is so important, then why does anybody value the short term, right? Shouldn't it have been extinguished evolutionarily? And no.

sometimes making a short-term decision makes sense. So if you need that money to survive, right? If that's a lot of money to you because you come from maybe an economically disadvantaged background,

That can make sense. In fact, there's work, not mine, but by lots of people who do the marshmallow experiment with kids from different SES backgrounds. What they find is kids from SES backgrounds that are very disadvantaged, where they don't have a good belief that the future's gonna pan out or that the promises you make about getting money are actually real or that they can trust you. They show what is believed to be less self-control, right? That is they'll take the smaller prize, they'll take the marshmallow

But it's not really irrational in those cases, right? Because if you believe that the future is not gonna come true, then take what you've got and run with it. And the reason we're miscalibrated now is because we used to live in a world where there was much less certainty, right? I mean, you didn't know if there was gonna be food tomorrow. So if you had a lot of food, eat it now. You didn't know if certain things were gonna happen tomorrow, if you were gonna be around tomorrow. Now in this world,

I know that if I buy a CD or a bond, it's gonna pay me X amount in so many years. I know if I smoke, it's gonna be bad for me. I know if I overeat, it's gonna be bad for me. Certainty is so much higher, but our brains haven't quite caught up with this. And that's why we make these irrational decisions. But to answer your question, sorry for the long roundabout ways, the way that we deal with this in the research is we make sure when we assign people to conditions that we balance out all of those issues.

so that within all of my groups before I make one feel grateful and the other one feel happy and nothing, we're making sure that SES and need and all those things are balanced so that it can't be attributable to those other causes. But I think you're absolutely right in that where you're starting from, what your background expectations are can greatly determine what seems like a rational choice for you. Okay, thanks. Yeah.

Hi. I was wondering if you had any specific examples of ways that managers or leaders have cultivated environments of gratitude and compassion that can ultimately help a team grow or achieve a goal. Well, it's funny. One of the things I talk about in the book was a study done actually by human... I know it's not called human resources at Google. I forget what it's called. But it's basically Google human resources. And they're looking at team success.

And they thought, well, what's gonna account for team success? And they thought, well, technical expertise, especially of the manager. Turned out that wasn't the biggest predictor. The biggest predictor was, was there a culture of empathy on the team? That is, could people,

trust each other? Did they feel they could support each other? Did the manager instill in the team a culture where it was okay and expected that we would talk about problems that we were having and share with each other? And to the extent that they did, those teams succeeded. Why? Well, you know, if you're working hard to kind of develop stuff and be creative, then

there's always a risk of failure in that. And so you have to be comfortable that those around you are gonna be continually to support you and help and rather than try and take advantage of you so they can climb their ladder within the work group. And so I think if you're a manager, what you can begin to do is to both emulate it yourself, but also take time within the workflow of your team, whether once a week, once a day, once a month, whatever it might be.

to engage in these types of exercises that build empathy and compassion. Talk about your problems, talk about your fears, talk about what's working and what's not. Another great strategy out there, Adam Grant often talks about this, is what's called the...

circle of reciprocity. And so what you might do as a team is you'd put up on the board everybody's name in your work group, and then everybody has to write a problem they're having at work or even not at work. And then everybody then has to say, I can help you with this. You pick one and then you put your name next to that. And then what you do is you draw

connections from people who, here's my problem, people are willing to help, and suddenly you see the interconnections. And if everybody does that, what that then does is it starts to automatically instill gratitude and compassion within the team, and it flows forward. Hi, thanks for coming today. You had a slide that said 120%, something about how people with a certain type of grit tend to fall harder. Could you elaborate on that again? Yeah, so this was a study done where it measured people's

personality trait called conscientiousness, which is characterized by being someone who's very detailed, very focused, and always wanting to do the right thing, suppressing their desires for temptation so that they can persevere. And if you look at the correlation of that and grit, the correlation is like 0.8 something. And so if you're high on one, you're high on the other.

They followed these people and when they experienced a setback, which I think in this study, and one of the studies was they lost their job, so it was unemployment. How much did that affect them? Adjusting for SES and everything else,

the hit to their well-being that they reported in terms of stress and what they felt and how they dealt with that was 120% more intense that their unease and their stress than were people who worked and pursued their goals with a different kind of more inclusive emotion-based style.

Hi. So you talk about empathy and compassion, and especially in design, empathy is such a fuzzy, sexy word. But I'm curious about your research and if you surface any findings on vulnerability and how does that affect people's ability to express gratitude, compassion, and pride?

So what do you mean by surface? Like if I show you how I'm vulnerable, does that make me have more compassion or others more compassion toward me? I guess I'm wondering if your participants talked about...

What does it mean to be vulnerable? Because I mean, even with like empathy, you can't truly be empathetic unless you allow yourself to be vulnerable enough to possibly experience and try to understand the other side. So I'm just kind of wondering if there's any correlation that you found within your research. So we didn't look at vulnerability per se, but one thing I want to point out is these terms like empathy and compassion are often used interchangeably. They're really different things.

So empathy, as you're saying, is I'm allowing myself to understand what you're doing and to feel what you feel. So if I have empathy for you and you're distressed, I'm gonna feel that distress. Compassion is different. Compassion means both in the scientific neuroscience world and in the Buddhist world, it basically means that I don't have to feel what you're feeling. I just have to want to help you.

And what we find is that there's a big difference. So people who make themselves vulnerable to kind of allowing myself to feel your anxiety, your pain, your distress, whatever it may be, can lead to burnout over time, right? This is why you hear people talk about empathy burnout among caregivers. And so our strategy is to help people feel compassion to want to help other people without having to take on that burden.

that they're feeling themselves because it can be paralyzing to do that. And it's also sometimes, you know, the Buddhists will call, they'll call kind of empathy like that. They'll call it idiot compassion. And what I mean by idiot compassion is the classic example of is it, is your child wants to do something that's like your child wants to play with a knife.

and you say, no, you can't play with that knife and you take it away from the child, the child starts screaming and crying, right? Well, in that moment, if you wanted to make the kid feel better and felt compassion, you'd give him the knife back. But you know, that's not good for that kid's long-term health. The same thing if they want to overeat cookies or they want to go out and play and not study. And so sometimes...

to behave truly compassionately, you have to be willing to let the other person suffer a little bit and help them through it. But the way to do that is to not always take that suffering on yourself in an empathic way. So you want other people to know that you understand them, but engaging in a strategy where you're feeling what they're feeling can be very counterproductive. Does that kind of answer your question? So then are you referring to pity? I guess I kind of do the opposite of like empathy is like pity of like,

No, I think of empathy as your ability to simulate what somebody else is feeling and to feel it yourself. Whereas compassion is wanting them to feel better and working to help them, but not feeling their pain. Thank you. Yeah. Okay. Thank you everybody for coming. Thanks for listening. To discover more amazing content, you can always find us online at youtube.com forward slash toxic Google. Talk soon.