Dr. Adam Grant: How to Unlock Your Potential, Motivation & Unique Abilities
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Welcome to the huberman lab podcast, where we discuss science and science space tools for everyday life. I'm endure huberman and i'm a professor of neurobiology and opposite logy at stanford school of medicine. My guess today is doctor adam grant.

Adam grant is a professor of organization psychology at the warton school at university of pensylvania. He has authored five best selling books and most recently has authored a new book entitled hidden potential. He received his bachelor's degree from harvard university and his doctor from the university of michigan.

Today, we discuss p reviewed studies and tools based on the data from those studies that can enable people to meet their goals and overcome significant chAllenges, including how to overcome procrastination, as well as how to see around or through blind spot, as well as how to overcome sticking point in motivation and creativity. We also discuss the research on and practical tools related to the underpinnings of performance in any endeavor, including how to increase one's confidence and how to have a persistent growth mindset. By the end of today's episode, IT will be clear to you, the doctor, adam grant, has an absolutely spectacular depth and breath of knowledge, and that knowledge is both practical IT is based on peer reviewed research, and he conveys those tools with the utmost clarity and generosity.

Indeed, by the end of today's episode, you will have more than a dozen new tools never discuss before on the huberman and lab podcast that you can apply in your academic endeavors, in athletic endeavors, in creative endeavors, in fact, in any area of life. Before we begin, i'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching researchers at stanford. IT is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public.

In keeping with that theme, i'd like a tent sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is element. Element is an electro light drink with everything you need and nothing you don't.

That means of salt, magnesium and potassium, so called electorate and no sugar. Now salt magnesium um in patashie are critical to the function of all the cells in your body, in particular to the function of your nerve cells, also called neurons. In fact, in order for your neurons to functions properly, all three electrical lights need to be present in the proper ratio. And we now know that even slight reductions in electronic concentrations or dehydration of the body can lead to deficits. And cognitive and physical performance element contains a science back electronic ratio of one thousand milligrams that one gram of sodium, two hundred milligrams of plastic um and sixty milligrams of magnesium.

I typically drink element first in the morning when I wake up in order to hydrate my body and make sure I have enough extra lights and while I do any kind of physical training and after physical training as well, especially if i've been sweating a lot, if you'd like to try element, you can go to drink element that's element dot com slash huberman to claim a free element sample pack with your purchase. Again, that drink element L M dot com slash huberman. Today's episode is also brought to us by waking up, waking up as a meditation APP include hundreds of meditation programs, mindfulness training, yoga eda sessions and n sdr non sleep depressed protocols.

I started using the waking up up a few years ago because even though i've been doing regular meditation since my teens and I started doing yoga ea about a decade ago, my dad mentioned to me that he had found in an APP, turned out to be the waking up APP, which could teach you meditations of different durations. And that had a lot of different types of meditations to place, to bring your body into different states. And that he liked IT very much.

So I gave the waking up up a try. And I too found IT to be extremely useful, because sometimes I only have a few minutes to meditate, other times have longer to meditate. And indeed, I love the fact that I can explore different types of meditation to bring about different levels of understanding about consciousness, but also to place my brain and body into lots of different kinds of states, depending on which meditation I do.

I also love the waking up up has lots of different types of yoga ea sessions, those you don't know yogananda a is a process of lying very still, but keeping an active mind. It's very different than most meditations. And there is excEllent scientific data to show that yogananda.

And something similar to IT called non sleep deep breath or n sdr, can greatly restore levels of cognitive physical energy even, which is to a short ten minute session. If you'd like to try the waking up up, you can go to waking up dot com slash huberman and access a free thirty day trial. Again, that's waking up dot com slash huberman to access a free thirty day trial. And now for my discussion with doctor adam grant. Adam.

welcome here.

Very excited to have you here. Your career, both public facing an academic career of covered an enormous range of topics. So we have a lot to cover, like is sucking.

And any time two professor sit down or even one professor says we have a lot to cover. I think everyone listening to races themselves like, oh, no. But these topics, I assure everyone, are of the utmost interest.

And you cover them in such both fabulous detail, and you make IT very clear. So i'm really looking forward to this. I'd like to start off by talking about something that i'm obsessed by.

And I know a lot of people are obsessed with and struggle with. And I know you also have a recent publication on this topic, which is procrastination. I am a bit of a procrastination, but a different way of stating that is that I love deadlines.

I learned in college that I love, love, love deadlines because IT seems to harness my focus on my attention. I just enough. I guess you call IT his idea automatic isle for the you neuroscience or physiology oriented folks, for me just brings about a total elimination of all the distractors.

And IT seems to both slow and accelerate my perception of time. And IT seems to bring out my best to have deadlines. But I would prefer to not have to procrastinate in order to self imposed deadlines.

I prefer that other people impose those deadlines, in fact. So what do we know about procrastination? Why do some people complete things well in advance? Why do whether people procrastinate is that they're seeking deadlines, as I believe I am. And interestingly, and sort of looting to this recent paper viewer, what is the relationship between procrastination and creativity?

I feel like we should just deal with all that later. Sport IT up. No good one. By the way.

there's extra credit for science plans on here.

So done, one of the best articles on procrastination ever written was titled at last my articles on procrastination and last yeah just made me smile. So I think the the basic question I think to start with is why do we progressing IT? And I I thought I was immured.

Actually, when I came into this topic, I was the person who annoyed my college remains. By finishing my thesis a couple months early, I found out there was a term for me. I'm a procrastinator.

So that the focus on the pressure that you get from the deadline, I get that the moment the project starts um and sometimes months or years in advance. And so I was really proud of finishing everything early. And then I discovered there are things that I procrastinate on to, which was a little bit disappointing.

Are you win to share .

what some of those so I procrastinate anything that's administrative so i'm right there with you want to get time on my calendar IT could take me weeks to respond. You ask me a question about social science. I will be back to you in a minute um I procrastinate.

Ding takes me forever. I basically put off for 后半 that I thought had nothing in common IT turns out that I progressing， ate when i'm bored, like bottom is. I guess it's probably my most hated emotion. And so I will do anything to avoid a boring task.

And I think this goes to why people proclaimed, which is a lot of people think it's laziness or you're not disciplined enough, but actually the research on this is really clear that you're not avoiding work when you're procrit. In fact, a lot of our procrastination is focused on doing things that involved a lot of energy. You've seen people probably clean their entire houses when they're putting off a task.

So IT is not that you're being lazy, it's that you're avoiding negative emotions, that a task start up. So for me, it's about to m. For a lot of people, it's fear or anxiety.

I don't know if I can pull this off. I have an extreme case of impostor syndrome in this role um the the chAllenge in front of me is too daunting for some people is confusion. I haven't figured that out yet and so I can't work on this because I I feel like come stuck. Um so what's I guess the big question for you that Andrews, what's the causes you of questioning you know.

it's hard for me to identify the stick here. I think of IT more is the carrot that comes with deadlines. And again, I don't consider myself of praste or pursue. I just really love deadlines and procrastination is a terrific way to simulate the deadline. Um so for me, so you wait.

so you delay starting or finishing a task in order to have a sense of time pressure that's right.

IT builds a certain amount of internal ws on me to know, okay, i've got seventy two hours to complete something and it's now game time. I like the game time before the game time before a podcast I put in anywhere from you several days to weeks or even months in preparation. So it's really elastic depending on the topic. But when IT came to exams in school where he comes to writing deadlines, um I consider the the shipping of the product or the presentation of the live event that I happened to be doing as the second game, the or event the first event is the pressure and the excitement of getting into the group of doing focused work because for me that such a drug, I mean IT, feels like all having all the systems of my brain in body oriented towards one specific thing, is just sheer blessed for me.

So IT sounds like that you're you're actually not a chronic procrastinator.

Thank you. And i've never that's never been the way I view myself. But now i'll .

take that a straw for .

IT is a strategy that's right. And I and I was fairly wayward youth, fairly finished high school center. So by time I got serious about school, which was my second year of university, when deadlines were presented, like there's an exam, there's a mid term exam on a given date, that was exciting to me.

That was exciting. Like, okay, that's the big thing. That's my opportunity to to prove myself to myself because I was really coming from behind. And then the opportunity to or I should say that the feeling of dropping into that group like this is the exciting part is the preparation.

In a likewise with podcasting for our solar podcast, I love the research as much as I love presenting the material maybe more, maybe more, right? Likewise for university lectures or for traveling and giving someone hours as a traditional academic. I'm sure you family with that, right?

It's preparation is where you realize it's almost like I think of IT is somebody like like a minor in a mine and just finding a jam and of course, are then there are all the thoughts of what you can do with that later. And you're going to show people has a certain value to the world that set up. But but it's the searching in finding those games that is like even as I talk about that, I feel like my boys going to flow out the chair.

I have the same experience is that it's the sort of the unleash curiosity and then the rush of discovery and by the time you're teaching IT or explaining IT, but I already know this. I am not learning anything anymore. And yes, i'm excited to share IT and I hope it's other people. So yeah I think is as you talk about what your process looks like, I don't even think what you do qualifies as procris since .

technically is going Better and Better.

Seriously, if you think about how procrastination is defined, IT is delaying despite an expected cost and you don't think there's a cost, you actually see a benefit.

That's right.

And i've tried to starting things you have .

tried starting things earlier. And and I should say that my process often begins much earlier than the physical process. Like if I was being observed in an experiment, be okay, you know, Andrews, finally sitting down to, right, this spoke chapter, or, you know, finally sitting down to research some papers for an episode.

But i'm thinking about IT all the time, very much to the dismay of people in my life. You, i'm constantly think about these things. I'm working to take out the i'll have ideas and then i'll write them down. I constantly writing things down, voice members in to my phone, I ve method of capture where I busy trying to grab everything and then filter out what's useful. Do you have a process like that for for gleaning ideas a little bit?

I do. now. So when jian and I started this research on procrastination, SHE had SHE had come to me. He was a very creative doctoral student, and he said, I had my best ideas when i'm procris sinking.

And IT was one of those moments where I didn't believe her, but I thought I was an interesting enough idea that I was worth expLoring. And I said, show me, let's get some data. Let's see, we can test this.

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

yeah as I will call from that paper, there's inverted u shape function with procrastination on the vertical access and and and creativity on the arizona x flip. Sorry, okay. So explain to me then the relationship between procrastination .

and creativity. So basically, the peak of creativity is in the middle of procrastination and up of, I thought there's this fascinating. So then we go to the lab to say, can we replicate this? Can we control IT in an experiment? And the hardest st part of that was, how do you renomme assign people to protestant IT, to my knowledge, never been done before.

And we eventually figured out that we could give people a bunch of tasks to do and then tempt them with highly entertaining youtube videos ah that were placed on their screen. And we put different numbers of youtube videos there so that ah there's only one you're not attempted to procreate ate much. If there are four, you're probably going to get sucked into a little bit of youtube spiral. If there are eight, you might be putting off the test that's much less exciting than you watching Jimmy kimble's mean tweet, for example.

And this was done in a fairly naturalist environment.

Yes, people are on a computer there. They are asked to you to solve some creative problems that look pretty similar to what you might do in your job. And then we're going to score your creativity later.

And IT turned out that the people who were attempted to procrastinate moderately ended up generating the most creative ideas. So why is that? Um there are a couple of things that happened and you have to look at both sides of the curve.

So what's wrong with the procrastination and also what happens to the the extreme procrastinators um and in both cases, what happens is you end up with a little bit tunnel vision. So um when I dive right into a task, i'm stuck with my first ideas and I don't wait long enough to incubate and get my best ideas. Um i'm less likely to reframe the problem.

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

And meanwhile, the people in the middle who are starting to feel that pressure of what I know, but my wheels for ten minutes watching a bunch of youtube videos s are running out of time for this task. They still live enough time to work on the ideas that we're active in the back of their minds. And that gives them a shot at more novel ideas.

So i've tried to adopt this. To answer your question, I tried to adopt, this is my process now to say I will still dive and do a project ahead of schedule, but I will not commit to an idea until i've let IT in bed for a few weeks. And i'm working on other things, whether an earlier version of me, when I D sit down to write a book, as soon as I had the book idea, I would start writing on day one. Now I have the idea, I file IT away, and I get myself at least a month before I began drafting. And I think IT feels less productive, but it's far more creative.

What are your thoughts about some of what you described being an unconscious way of c ding, the mind and the unconscious with an idea? So for instance, let's take a school academics scenario where students getting assignment and the assignment is contained within a folder. And IT just says assignment OK and it's do in a particular date and it's a due on that particular date.

And they are given the folder, but they have no sense of what the assignment is. You can imagine one category procrastinator that will take that thing and put IT down and avoid looking at IT entirely, versus another category, procrastinate, that will flip, flip IT open and take a look. Okay, this is gonna a say on, I don't know, something about economic theory in the late seventeen hundreds, close IT.

And then there is an idea which I Frankly I subscribed to a little bit um because we recently did this series on mental health, not mental illness but mental health with dr. Paul county where he talked extensively about the Young conscious and how the Young conscious mind is always working with ideas, things that we are, cern, about performance. These get sorts of things, even if you're not aware of them. What are your thoughts about the creativity that ceded by slight procrastination being related to actually knowing what you're procrustes anyone specifically?

I I think IT turns out to, I don't want to say, essential, but critical. So one of things we found is in order for a moderate procrastination to fuel creativity, you have to be intrinsically motivated by the finger procrastinating on interest. And so what what happens is if if you if you're bored, for example, by the topic, you're not going to open the folder.

You're not going to start thinking about IT at all. It's not going to begin. You're not going to do any subconscious processing.

You're not going to have any unexpected connections between this topic and something else you have learned, learned about or or been curious about if you're interested in the problem. Then when you put IT off, you're much more likely to still keep IT active in the back, your mind. And that's when you begin to to see, imagine you can explain the biology of this.

I imagine, for example, there there's probably um there's probably more neural networks um that are connecting um you probably get you get access to ideas that previously would have been sort of separate nodes. And so I think that you you want to know what the topics, right? You don't want to just see the blank assignment, but you will also have to find a reason that this is exciting to you. Otherwise you're going to avoid IT as opposed to letting a percolated.

That brings us to the topic of intrinsic motivation, and i'd like to link that up with the topic of performance. So when I was in university, there were many topics that I was excited to learn about, some more than others, of course, but occasionally i'd be in a class or are getting assignment that Frankly had minimal interest in, never zero, but minimal interest.

And as a way of dealing with that, I embarked on a process literally lying to myself and just telling myself, okay, i'm super interested in reading this, and i'm going to force myself to be interested in reading IT. And lone behold, I would start falling in love with certain things. Maybe was IT was even the, you know, the arrival of a word that I didn't recognize.

And then I would go look at up. And I knew I was studying for the gr at that time. So I had filed that way.

I still have my new books of all the vocabulary words that I learned in the course of university courses that Frankly made the verbal potential of the gr pretty easy, you know, which, if you ever trying to study for that, the end it's pretty tough to commit all those new words to memory in context. So I could find little hooks, and through those hooks I could can rattle IT my way into a larger interest. And then me whole, i'm really interested in greek metal logy.

You know that actually like that one at first, but I would have to trick myself. But, you know, may we could spend a little bit of time talking about what is true. Intrinsic motivation is IT always reflective.

Can we make ourselves intrinsically motivated about us given topic or scenarios or group of people? And then let's talk about how intrinsic motivation links to performance, because there's a rich literature on this, as I recall and I remember now the stanford study of rewarding kids for things that we're remote to do. IT would could touch on that a little bit and and remind people who have been heard about IT.

But i'm fascinated by this topic because I feel like so much of life is about doing things that initially we don't feel that excited to do yeah and yet succeeding in life. You know, until you can afford to upload your administrative work to somebody else, which hopeful ly you right now you have one right 啊， this is fundamental to being a functional human being, Frankly, not just successful in aircraft, but functional. We've got to do stuff that we .

don't enjoy doing. yes. So I think we can talk about a couple different ways to neurons of motivation. We can think about how the task itself is designed.

We can think about reward systems, and then we can think about also the things we say to ourselves and others, which I hope are not lies, but rather persuasive attempts. Let's to start on that when actually, I don't know a lot of people who are that good at delivering itself. deception.

Well, well, I like to the thing. He was only around a particular set of a gold mode motivated pursuit, but at that time, for me, also survival as mh, I didn't do well in high school. I really want to perform well in university.

But I knew that working just for the grade wasn't going to Carry me. That was IT felt catabolic. And I would know maybe I at that age I was still in the window of heightened donal plasticity. We know IT never closes, but but I think I also fell in love with the process of learning how to do what I just described.

yeah. So I think for most people, the best method of self persuasion is actually to convince somebody else something of Ellie aron's classic research, a cognitive distant, where he would, he would ask you to go and tell somebody else a task you hated is really interesting. And if you paid you a lot to do IT, you still hate to the task because you had a justification? I got twenty books to to to fit a little bit about this task. Um you know the task is bad, but I did IT for the for the payment when you paid you one dollar to go until somebody that you love the task that you didn't, you ended up lacking IT more wow.

And maybe I shouted, be surprised but maybe you should tell me why I shouldn't be because I hope people got what you just said very clearly if they didn't. If you don't like doing something, going in reporting to somebody else, how great that thing is. So lying about IT to somebody else is one way to increase the degree to achieve, like, or enjoy that behavior or topic. And if you're paid twenty dollars to go light to somebody in the positive direction, so against you, you believe it's less effective in shifting your underlying effect, that thing, your emotions. And then if you're paid less.

correct. exactly. Now I think obviously in the experiment, lying was the an easy way to to show the effect. But in real life, I think the way that you want to apply this is to say i've got to find something about this task that's interesting to me and then in the process of explaining IT to somebody else, i'm going to convince myself because i'm hearing the argument from somebody, everybody like can trust. I've also chosen, I chosen the reasons that I find compelling, as opposed to hearing somebody else se's reasons.

And so I think this goes to the point that you were making, which is if if you're trying to to find a hook, make a topic intriguing, you've got to figure out, okay, what is that that would make this fascinating to me. And a lot of cases is what you're looking for as a curiosity gap. Um I think social scientists like to talk about curiosity is in each that you have to scratch.

So there's something you want to know and you don't know IT yet. So I would say, I tell my students often take her favor class and find a mystery era puzzle like something that you you just do not know the answer to you. Like I actually i've talked with our kids about this.

Like what what really happened to king tt, do you know, can you get to the bottom of that? And obviously wonder. I need to google, and then I need to see if wikipedia has credible information on this. And the more you learn about that, the more intriguing IT becomes. I think that that's the beginning of the process of of finding .

in transit motivation. I see so inherent in your answers, the idea that there's something wired into our neural circuits, and therefore psychology, that curiosity as a verb, the act of being curious and seeking information where well, and I should say, I define curiosity, and I hopefully you'll disagree with me, you will agree, either way, doesn't matter as long as we can get a Better, deeper understand.

I define curiosity as a desire to find something out where you are not attached to a particular outcome. yes. Is that right?

Yeah in psychologists typically defined as just wanting to know and that means if you're driven by the question, not a particular answer, which is exactly what you're .

driving at OK great. So and I think that was dorthy Parker that said, um the cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity as .

there shouldn't be a cure for curiosity so um .

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

Okay, let me back up. So if your child or an adult is drawing, working, expLoring a topic or going about the assignment of any kind, um you will give them a question that they then need to resolve. What if is the assignment is? Like, rake the leaves off the front lawn. Do you do you say, you know, count the leaves or, I mean, how how does one get past the sort of procrastination and generate some intrinsic motivation for things that one read, where it's unlikely that they are going to discover some knowledge that's exceedingly useful for for future?

You always start with what the first experiment, find the most interesting looking leaf for your favorite leaf, and then that that last for about two minutes. Okay, now with a lot of leaves there, right? I think not all tasks can be made intrinsically motivating to everyone. And so when when intrinsically motivation is divulge, to find what you want to substitute with this is a sense of purpose. Maybe a Better way to say that is, when the process is not interesting to you, you need to find a meaningful outcome.

So there's there's some research and and the boring but important effect where kids who have a purpose for learning this goes through high school and think, you know this is not just interesting to me but i'm going to be able to use this knowledge to um to help other people one day. Um they they are more persistent, they're studying, they end up getting Better grades. And so I think intrusive motivation is often driven by curiosity about the how a sense of purpose comes from really thinking hard about the why why does this matter? And so I say with you know the raking leaves, let's try to connect that task to something that is you care about.

Are you going to um you know pleasantly surprise your parents when they get home? Um are you going to um you know have a place to place soccer er that you didn't before um and I think then the you know the the process of of getting to that. I guess what I say is if you're trying to motivate yourself, um it's a little bit harder than if you're trying to motivate somebody else on this.

If I was going to motivate somebody else, I would take A A page out of the motivational interviewing playbook. Well, I would say, okay, Andrew, actually this plays out for a second. So you're going to make a piles leaves.

It's a two hour task. The year, the ten. How excited are you?

About three?

Three, really. I'm surprised. I thought you can say zero or one. Why isn't IT not lower?

Um I like any sort of physical activity because they allows me to move, and I just like moving my body.

There we go. okay. So you just identified a potential source of purpose for that activity.

And I don't have I don't have a vested interest in convincing you to do this task. I am genuinely curious about what would motivate you to want to do IT. And as you start to articulate boom self persuasion .

icks in love IT, i'm going to start using these these approaches right .

at your own risk.

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Have a question about extrinsic motivation. So if we grow up being incentivised by extensive things, you know, you'll get your allowance. If you black, you can spend the money that you make and you know on your paper out doing the things you really want to do.

Is there any value in those kinds of learning based incentives um for kids and for adults because I mean that's the real world as well. I I know plenty of people have family members that only work for a paycheck and their pretty okay because they like spending their paycheck. Yeah probably more than you know i'm not intensity ally attach to money.

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

There's so there's a huge body of evidence on what are the effects event extrinsic rewards and motivation and performance.

I think the latest conclusions, if you look at the the latest met analysis, so you huge study of study is trying to cumuli what's the average effect of adding a financial incentive to a test that wasn't incentivize before or to a job where you know you were paid salary and now we're going to give you instead of compensation. Um there is a boost. So in general, um people uh are more productive when they are incentivize for their output. But these incentives are Better for for motivating quantity and quality. So you see people get more done, but they're not necessarily more careful or more thrown.

Are they less careful? Unless no.

actually they're still positive effects on average, they're just weaker. And of course, you could then start to say, well, how do I incentivize you being fast and careful? But I think where where we do have to be really cautious is there's an undermining effective transit rewards on intrinsic motivation.

And you were alluding to this earlier dating back to the early seventies, where we know that if we take an interesting task and then we pay you for IT, you might conclude that you are only doing IT for the outcome and you lose interest in the task. The classic demonstration, mark leppin colleagues is kids playing video games. And there they're playing them because they're fun.

And then you start to add in an incentive. And then when the inside was taken away, and I want to play anymore because the meaning of the task has changed. And now i'm doing IT because I want to get something out of IT as opposed to, I love the process, I think that that that phenomenon does not have to exist.

So we know, for example, at work, if managers as long as they give people autonomy um they don't present the rewards in a controlling way um so instead of saying, Andrew, in order to earn this, you need to do the following work if they say, hey look know i'd really love IT if you if you would deliver the following um in in order to make that worth your while, i'm offering this incentive. People react very differently when they have a sense of choice and control um so I think that I guess the starting point in the presence of autonomy, I I don't think there is a major downside of of extranet rewards. I think you also have to be careful that um yeah I guess that you're not over justifying the task.

In other words, you're not a you're not swamping people's intensive reason for doing IT, but you're adding a reason to try IT. So actually, if we if we go to a different domain for a second, so look at kids who don't wants to eat their vegetables. Experts and concentrations are very effective to get kids to try vegetables for the first time, but then the hope is that they discover a vegetable to that they don't mind and then they find reasons to keep doing IT.

Um and I think that that's how I want a lot of rewards to work. I don't think that rewards should be carrots that we dangle to try to control people's behavior. I think there should be symbols of how much we appreciate and value a particular behavior. If you frame them that way, it's a lot easier for people to say, yeah, no, that reward is something that I really want. But i'm not only doing the task for that reward yeah .

that that you based answering the question I was going to ask, which is your risk of sounding new age, but we are sitting in california. I could imagine that when one is focused on the extrinsic rewards so of physical task or cognitive task for an extremist reward, if i'm focusing on the extremes of reward, i'm also air quads again, not present, right? I'm i'm thinking about the outcome.

I'm not thinking about process and I think there's and you perhaps you can flash out some of what this is exactly, but I think there's fairly extensive data to support the idea that when we are physically, mentally present to the task that we're going to perform Better and presumed ly are are intrinsic liking of that task or performing that task increases as well as that. true. Yeah, I think so.

I think so. If we want to break down the mechanisms for why and transit motivation is useful for for performance, one you touch an earlier, it's focus of attention. It's much is here to find flow.

When you're intrinsically motivated, you get into that state of deep absorption where time melts away. So you mention sort of either speeding up or slowing down your sense of time. You forget where you are. Sometimes you even lose track of your identity and you're just you're just merged into the task. Uh, and so that that concentration is helpful. There is also A A greater persistence effect that when you enjoy what you're doing, you're less likely to give up in the face of obstacles, you're more likely to think about IT when you're not doing the task and come up with great ideas. And so um you know I think there there's a working harder, there's a working longer, there's a working smarter and there's also thinking more clearly effect.

This is a brief but related. One of the things that i've found incredibly difficult in the recent years is that um you know most of my life, really since I was a small kid, I was forging for things and then know I used to give lectures on monday in class if they let me, until they eventually stop me about the stuff I was reading about all weekend, gone to early start in the professorial front.

But now if i'm reading something, and I discover what I think is a really valuable piece of information, or a tool or a protocol, all this is really cool. These findings are also cool. There's a problem, which is that now I have an opportunity to cast that out to the world through social media. We all do. This could .

be on social .

media from time to time.

Are you?

You would and I both do our own social media, as which I really appreciate. Thank you. One can always detective if someone also handling someone on social media so yes i'm on social media and and I love that I have the opportunity to both send out ideas and information and also receive feedback. I really love the comments section um and always encourage comments I learned from IT Frankly I .

learned from IT you .

know and and you and I were wed in the academic culture where Frankly the kind of having that that one receives an academic cultures different than the kind of having the one receives on social media. But let's just say that if you come up through academy you develop a pretty big skin.

I agree. I do have to say though, there was a part of me that was really surprised when I started posting on social dead. I love, I love constructive criticism. I was unprepared for the number of people who will need you criticize the study without even looking at whether the methods are rivers might come out. If I posted this, surely it's at least worth concerning the possibility that strong .

evidence by the right. Well, that's where a brief I wanted call IT a but a response of, you know know clearly you should read the study further because I think you'll be satisfied with the answer or something I don't know, but I agree IT IT can be a little bit harsh in there.

But let you know the social media h channels are I think they have it's a double edge plate there obviously have their issues, but um can be a wonderful opportunity to share information and share IT quickly. The problem is that IT takes me out of what I was doing initially, which was learning, searching for those games, which to share later. And I think there's a broader landscape to consider this where people, for instance, are I was at the beach yesterday IT.

Just absolutely spectacular day at the beach, especially for this time of year. And everyone was taking pictures of that experience on their phone and probably sharing that experience either is social media with friends. This is very different than taking a photograph and not seeing that photograph until later or not sending IT out.

And so there are now near infinite number of circumstances where we are taking out of the rewarding experience. I should refer that we are taking ourselves out of the rewarding experience and focusing on a different rewarding experience that I think my definition is an extrinsic reward. So we are taking yourselves out of our intranet, rewarding experience and activating these extrinsic rewards.

And do you think in any way that's undermining our experience of things that we really enjoy? Again, not to demi social media of these channels, but i've personally found IT difficult to refrain from sharing this knowledge. I'm so excited to share, but I deliberately delay. And there's a lot of deep list of folders for of things that I want to post, but i've just doing IT no systematically over time because I really fight the temptation to do this most of because I want to continue to enjoy this learning process and seeking process so much.

Yeah, I feel the same, the same. I feel torn. I think I think was E B White who said, I rise in the morning torn between the desire to enjoy the world and the desire to improve the world.

And this makes the difficult to plan the day. And I I feel that every day I think, I mean, I even I felt at this morning I was okay. This is time to leave to to come to the the human man podcast.

I wait, but I didn't hit my minimum sunlight viewing. What do I do? Do I show up on time for you, or do I meet .

your criteria? The the explanation I was getting my morning sunlight, and therefore i'm x number of minutes or even hours late.

would have been completely fine with, yes, actually acceptable excuse with you. I think I think everybody experiences a version of this and is definitely gotten worse with with social media and with smart phones, I think. So what the most startling dat points for me was the glory mark first put this on my radar before covered, the average person was checking email seventy two times a day.

How do you ever concentrate for more than a couple minutes if you are self interacting that often you can't? brig. Shelty has a great term for that. SHE caused IT time conference, and he says we're taking these meaningful blocks of time and we're slicing them up into these like tiny little dots of.

And but none only can we not accomplish anything, we're also eroding our own sense of joy because it's really hard to enjoy the the thirty second blip of time that you get on a task. And I think we know a lot more about the existence of these problems, how to solve them. But one thing we do know is blocking out on interrupt tive time is meaningful. There's a great lesly parloe experiment where SHE takes engineers and he has them, he said, a quiet time policy, no interceptions. Tuesday, thursday, friday before noon, sixty five percent of average productivity.

Could you repeat the the protocol again? Yeah.

so quiet time, the couple iterations of IT. But I think the most effective one was tuesday, thursday, friday, no meetings, no interactions, no slack, no emails before new. And during those periods .

of no interruptions, one could tend to, whatever their primary purposes at work, and for me might be podcasting. Obviously, I would don't know my phone in here and never do. But IT doesn't mean no interaction with anyone else. That just means focusing on the major task, the exactly.

and you come in with a clear sense of priority and purpose. And I don't think there's anything magical about to say they are safe friday before noon. It's just the idea of setting a boundary and collectively committing to IT that, that seems to be important.

And I think when I think about this um I be really curious about your take on rono types here because I think one thing i've learned in the last couple years is that if you're if you're a morning person, you do your best analytical and creative thinking in the morning and so the quiet time block would work very well for for me as a morning person. If you're a night at will, you probably want that block in the late afternoon. And I was encouraged there were some evidence during covet that people have their best meetings right after lunch that there something like thirty percent less likely to multi task in an after lunch meeting.

And I guess you could probably unpack the food, come a you getting reenergized by other people. But it's let me to wonder if we should all be protecting the first few hours in the last few hours of the day for deep work and then doing our core meetings and interactions and kind of off task activities in the middle. What do you think about that is a sequence?

yeah. Well, I ve a lot of questions about this for you, but I love that sequence IT certainly fits with my natural rythm. I I think there's ample evidence to support the fact that provided one is sleeping well at night and is on a more less of standards ds schedule.

As I stand, I am going to bed somewhere between, let's say, nine thirty and eleven thirty P M. Waking up some time between, let's say six A M and adam, maybe five thirty years, seven thirty um something like that. So not highly unusual night out or super early bird for people that are following that sort of schedule.

The first lets just say, from zero to eight hours after waking tends to be A A fairly robust increase in all the catacomb an so dope eua an offer which generally, okay, generally speaking, lead to increases in alertness, attention and focus that are great for analytics work, great for implementation of strategy that you already understand and you need to turn through a lot of stuff. Um and of course, is a big increase in the morning, especially a few few morning sunlight, a healthy crease, I should say in court, all court is all is not bad folks. You want cause all but you want that pick early in the day.

We know that. okay. So for most people IT seems at least my understanding is that um that period of times zero or uh eight hours after waking or so um is best devoted to the cording quote, most critical tasks.

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

And we tend up, up a lot of energy early in the day. And I obsess with the idea of neural energy as a service, just chloric energy. Um so there were time, much neural energy and then post the launch. So really I was forget to this sort of you nine to seventeen hours after waking there is a depo tonic ic elsewhere that during the middle day that post pointi's debt there's a post lunch sleeping ess um that can be partially offset by dealing your morning caffeine a bit if you have the afternoon crash.

But it's interesting ly you know that more productive meetings and less um test switching and distraction occurred um in meeting set after lunch because that makes me think that perhaps being a little bit less alert is going to lend itself to more focus and indeed that's the the of optimal state. Relaxed but focus. You not sleepy um but you also don't have so much intrinsic energy that you're tending to a bunch of things because I think a lot of people do feel that way.

I'm drinking double espresso right now. Um late men morning um late morning um and you know I can sit still, but I think of certain zoo m meetings. How do I say this? I want to defend any my colleagues. I mean that they are boring enough.

They are not content rich enough to to grab on my attention in nowaday, of course, our multiple scenes to believe about two phones in a computer and you have really spend some work to flip over those phones while i'm on the room and things like that. Um so maybe so so maybe the reduction in autonomic arsa that that supports what you just described. But I don't know my my thinking, my understanding rather was that creative work and kind of brainstorming was best accomplished in the late afternoon.

I've noticed in lecturing i'd be curious what your experiences with in university lectures. When I held courses in the evening, I used to like to hold my courses five to seven pm, even seven and nine thirty P. M.

When I was teaching undergraduate, that people were much loser and more relaxed. And I always thought that might have something to do with an increase in gaba transmission that's known to happen in late evening. The people were just going more relaxed and less social anxiety.

They've been around people for much of the day. I I sent back more reflections than answers. I don't have any firm news science explanations for what you described, but but there are some emerging theories about how that might work.

And IT has this year, year to nine hours, face one. Nine to seventeen hours, face two. And then of course, from seventeen to twenty four hours, i'll call IT face.

You should be a sleep. Yeah, ideally. Well, I think there's .

there there's a confound in your your teaching experience, which is undergrads often sleep in until what noon or they might be up until for I am or at .

least ten im seems to be a typical rise time for the so the morning class .

might be too early for them to be fully awake but there there is a brand new evidence that at least on creativity at work I read A A series of because three study is recently showing that early birds actually did do more creative work in the morning um and in part uh I think again, I know any neuroscientists has has touched the mechanism is on this yet.

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

Minor changes to be a little bit IT would be individual but there is something to these liminal states between sleep and waking. So maybe we can um wrap a convenient bow around what I said in what you just said, which is um that we know that in the transition states into an of sleep and IT doesn't necessary have to be within the first half hour in an out of sleep that um there seems to be more divergent and thinking at least activation of neural networks that um are not as constrained as one observes when they're in in a sheer task and strategy implementation mode. I mean.

I think is that similar to the shower effect.

the shower effect of people ideas in the shower or while running or while falling asleep, or my best idea is always come within the first hour after waking, that's I Carry a notebook round and much. This is my people, my life of them, I don't want to hear or from. I talked anyone first thing in the morning this this problem headache and I had to make adjustments. We'll talk about adjustments between um productivity and h control and and family interactions. This is something I know you you've worked on and and writing about um but those liminal states are are interesting and and i'd love your thoughts on this.

Um i've had several guests on this podcast talk about their creative process, namely ly rick rubin, famous for work in music producing all size a great podcast program on as well as called dirac colleague mine who's really in the point zero zero zero one percent of super talented bioengineer neuroscientist who also happen to be a full time um clinical psychiatrist and has five children okay um and I asked them about their creative process because both of them are very creative. Carl's process involves the following late at night for him, but he could really be any time of day deliberately making his body as still as possible enforcing himself to think in complete sentences, risk creative process, although that includes a lot of different things, has a lot to do with also getting very still lying down. okay? Other folks that i've spoken to, academics and artists, have referred to getting their body into motion, but quite their mind.

So these are two opposite processes. One case, the body is still, but the mind is deliberately very active. In the other scenario, the body is very active, but they're making their mind sort of in free association, not still, but they're not deliberately thinking about anyone thing.

And i'm obsessed with this. Maybe we united work on this do for us article. Maybe we could figure this out because I have any right, because the nervous system, no, the nervous system, i'm not aware of anyone done IT formally either.

The nervous system, of course, is a brain body phenomenon. And so what happens when we sort of cut off the deliberate Operations of brain or body? And IT doesn't seem to matter whether not its brain or body, as long as one is deliberately shut off. And so anyway, I love your thoughts on this. I don't consider myself like a ultra creative or .

creative type um .

tenny great degree. I'm fascinating that's i'm fascinated, deliberate that highly creative people have have undertaken in order to bring about ideas. I certainly have some of my best ideas when i'm running, and I i'll just to be running on, my goodness, I was even thinking, but now I need to write this down OK.

Then continue. I tried the darrah approach and that the rubin approach actually just spent a week with rick overseas and indeed he spends a lot of time just still thinking and it's a very hard practice to get to get consistent with. I onder.

I wonder if their individual differences here and which needs to be a stable or steady um think you know I think in about a huge part of creativity is um is overriding your default instincts and if you're somebody whose default is to have your mind constantly going, then quieting would probably shift your your train of thought to something more original or unconventional the opposite might be true if you have naturally quiet mine. I would imagine you you sort jolt yourself out of that with lots of access to to free ranging thoughts. And so if be interesting actually to study whether we can predict what you should still based on your personality.

yes, I want and maybe what we could do with that study. I think we have a collaboration growing. You know, there's a joke, two scientists walk into a room.

And what comes out as a collaboration? So i'd want to put people in a scanner. It's hard to get people tread milling in a scanner because a woman artifact.

But and just look at the resting network activation and compare that to resting network activation when people are completely still enforcing themselves to think and deliberate debris senses, and then look at the overlap in that then diagram. That's what's of interest to me. They may be completely different brain states. They might actually have more similarity. The differences.

I wonder that if you can tie that differences in the quality and quantity output. So I would imagine that one of the benefits of either kind of movement is that you you end up increasing the volume of ideas, which we know is good for a variety, and ultimately increases the probability that you stumble under something new.

But then I think the the being still part is probably Better for the filtering process of, I think one of the hardest parts of creativity is actually judging your own ideas. Most, most creative people have many terrible ideas. In fact, the most creative people have the most terrible ideas because they just have a lot of ideas. And I think that maybe there there's a way in which quite either your body in or your mind allows you to gain some distance from the idea and see whether it's bone headed ed or promising along those lines.

When one is trying engage the quality of their ideas, how do you cope with, how does one cope with not placing a judge on that, that causes some, you know false negatives where where you're wiping out great ideas because um you know rick rubin talks a lot about you don't give the audience what they want. They don't know what they want. They haven't even seen IT yet.

If it's a truly creative idea, they haven't seen IT. And um but of course we all have to develop our own sense of taste. So well, how does this process work for you?

I mean you ring about and worked on a tremendous range of topics um and always know, I must say, with with such a rigor and such clarity of communication about those topics yet absolutely true. I mean like one hundred percent. So we say around here, no weak sauce you and there's no weak sauce in your game. It's incredible. So when do you get your ideas and how do you filter those ideas?

I feel like the one could be any time I think that you have you've clearly experienced this too. For me, the best thing about hosting a podcast is I have an excuse to learn about anything I want from almost anyone I want, and I get to call that part of my job. And so I feel like, you know that having that built in mechanism for learning means ideas could could commit any moment at the the filtering process.

For me is it's of all over the last years. I what I do now is if i'm i'm starting a new book, i'll read a draft to the first chapter, and I send IT to five to eight people whose judgment I trust. And by design, some of those people are in my field.

There are deep seated in organizational psychology. Others are you very far outside, but curious about the topics i'm interested in. And I asked them for his year to a tenscore.

This is something I learned to do as as a springboard diver where I I take off um and i'm doing a few flips or and I think my dive is good, but I can't see IT because i'm hurling in mitten and everything's a blur. And so I have to rely on my coach to tell me if I was any good. I've really like creative workers the same way you're too close to IT to know how the audience is going to react to IT.

And yes, you don't want to create IT just for the audience, but the end of the day, you wanted to be interesting or useful of them. So I asked for this year to ten, and no one ever says ten. And then I use that as a calibration mechanism.

So if everybody y's in the seven or eight range, I know that i'm under something promising. And now I need to refine IT. If I get a match at two, three, three and half, I either need to rethink that idea or dramatically rewrite how i'm positioning IT.

And I think one of the mistakes a lot of people make is they know they need feed back on their ideas. They go to one or two people, and they start to feel a little bit offensive or threatened, and their ego gets involved, and then they don't ask for anymore what they don't realize. It's actually less painful if you get more feedback because when eight different people critique work, you start to realize that a few of the comments that sort of Bruce you a little bit, we're just idiosyncratic and no one else cared about those issues.

But then five people had the same problem like that is not taste. That is a quality issue. And i've got ta focus on that.

And so IT really helps to filter what the what are the revisions I need to make, what are the problems and complaints I need to pay attention to. This is, what can ignorance? Maybe this product was not for that person i'm calling.

When I was a postdoc, I had a manuscript fully prepared, and I worked a laboratory where I didn't work on the same thing as my postdoc advisor. He was very gracious and letting be the outlier. And he said, well, I don't know anything about this topic. So before you submit to this, finally, prestige, very, Frankly, very procedure journal of the honest if ride, go down the hall and hand IT to so and so I don't want to to do what because i'm still the same department and I gave IT to him this individual and he looked down. He said, yeah, you know, that looks interesting, but I don't think there's going to be a whole lot of interest in this is just like not I was like, no way like this.

I think this is really cool, but I was pretty just made I so what do I do? So went back to my adviser, and thankfully, I used a bit of one of iconic class and he said, that's the best feedback you could have gotten, definitely submitted to that particular journal. And I must say, that paper got accepted faster than any other paper. I've never had experiences like that. I mean, IT required some revisions. I remember thinking like, wow, what an unusual response to, after having instructions me to go ask A A A more senior colleague at that time of a system professor then to get the essentially negative response and then to take that as like you should definitely send IT out IT really taught me a lesson that sometimes one needs to invert their um their action according to the negative feedback they get not always but thousand and of one okay so this should should be exported to many circumstances but basic LED me to um not seek out feedback prior to submission of things terribly often. I mean I check information obviously prior to podcast. I check check the validity of the information in podcast, in papers but um IT made me realized that people's opinions can be like partly IT synced tic and and in some cases all right wrong and really the the opinion of the journals what when what mattered most in in terms of getting IT accepted or not so um how do you you said give IT to the greatest number of people but if it's anything like comments on social media, there's a silence to negative comments. So how should we filter positive as negative feedback?

Well there's there's met analysis here. This is clear in denese looking at one hundred years of the feedback research and they found that what drives the utility of feedback is not whether it's positive or negative, it's whether IT focuses on the task or on the self. So if I tell you that your work is terrible, you're going to to get defensive.

If I tell you that your work is great, you are going to get complacent. If I tell you here's a specific thing that I liked about your work, you're going to try to learn to repeat that. And if I told you here's the thing I didn't like, you are going to a try to see if you can fix IT.

So I actually think we should worry less about whether the feedback is encouraging or discouraging and more about how do I make sure that I get in that's going to allow me to learn from my strength and also overcome my weaknesses. Um and actually one of things that i've learned recently is there's some I was a growing body of evidence at this point that asking for feedback is not the best way to get people to help you. Um because when you ask for feedback, you end up getting two groups of people.

You get two leaders and you get critics and cheerleaders are basically applauding your best self. Critics are attacking your worth self. What you want is a coach, which is somebody who helps you become a Better version of yourself.

And the way you get people to coach you is not to say, give me feedback, because they will then look at the past and tell you what you screw up or what you did write. What you want is to say, can you give me advice for next time? And then they look at the future and they'll give you either a note done, something to repeat or something to correct.

And this is such a subtle shift that I can make a big difference. Andrew, one of things I guess I found myself applying this to a lot is, uh, after giving speeches, I used to get off stage and say, I would love some feedback and you get back a bunch of, oh, you know, I really enjoying that. thanks.

What do I do with that information? I'm trying to learn how to get Better. And when I shift the question to say, what's the one thing I could do Better next time? Like, oh, don't open with the joke. The audience can tell you are joking frequently. It's give me a little bit more of a three line. You've focused a lot on, you know, a bunch of interesting points, but I lost the connective tissue and those actionable suggestions are much more likely to come when you just ask for a tip as opposed to an evaluation .

that's so good, i'm going just pause for a second. Never taken a place. I've taken occasional post to be a spread.

They are very rare, as the audience knows. Oh, that's just zillion dollar advice because I think that everyone has an eo. We all want to perform well. We'd like to perform Better over time. And negative feed back hurts and IT can hurt a little or a lot depending on how offensive we are.

But a tool like you just describe to remove some of that defensive armor that we all have and actually let the information in, in a way that's constructive, really great. What you described, I think, is a way to create constructive criticism. But the constructive part is really coming from within as supposed to saying. I'd like some constructive criticism and then hoping that the criticism is actually constructive. So you're taking control over the process and in a healthy way.

I know that the goal and I big question that comes up for a lot of people at, okay. So I get somebody to give me advice, but IT might still stink. How do I get Better at taking IT constructively? And I think probably my favorite picnic on this, I learned from sha hn SHE calls at the second score.

And the idea is that when somebody gives you a piece of criticism, that your first score. So let's say, they in my world, they gave me a three and a half, and I want to know how I can do Better next time. How do I get myself to focus on that?

What I do is say, I want to get a tend for how well I took the three and a half, and that's the second score. I want to evaluate myself and how well I took the first score. I think about this almost everyday.

There was actually tell you quick story. So when I was right out of my doctor at, I got asked to teach a motivation class for air force generals in kernels. I was twenty five, I think twenty five, twenty six.

Um you know there are all twice my age. They've got that thousands of flying hours. They've got billion dollar budgets.

They've got, well, you know, this community well, their niches, striker and sand dune. And I was extremely intimate. So I I walked in there and I thought I had to impress them.

And I started talking about my credentials and all my research experience. And the feedback at the end of the four hour session was brutal. I remember reading the feedback forms, and one person had written more knowledge in the audience than on the podium.

true. I can't argue with that. And then another route, I gained nothing from this session, but I trust the instructor gained useful inside. And that that was devastating. I like, can I I would really like to transform and do an actual bear and hybernation the next four months, and then maybe i'll come out of a whole ready to hear this and have that option.

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

And one of the things I heard out in clear was that they evaluate humility. And I had made with too much confidence, which was just in security mask. And so I thought, okay, how do I, how do I change the equation? And walked in, looked to the room and I said, I know you're all thinking here right now.

What can I possibly learn from professor who, twelve years old, dead silents? No, it's gonna a horribly wrong. And then one of the guys in the audience jumps in is like, that's ridiculous.

Least thirteen. Everybody started laughing IT broke the ice. And I think what what I was trying to do was to take myself off the pedestal and say, look, I heard your feedback.

You told me that you didn't think I had anything to teach you. And I ve got to acknowledge that right up front and be open to the fact that's true. And so I want to come in here and learn from you, and I want to see if I can Carry a conversation where we all end up learning.

And the feedback was night and day different after tera one one person wrote, although junior an experience, the professor doubt with the evidence in an interesting way. So IT, i'll take IT. And there's something really powerful about about saying, look, I can't change the fact that they hated my session. What I can do is convinced them that I was motivated to learn from their criticism.

I love this concept to the second score, and thank you for sharing that story. I think um you know very often we hear about people like you who if people didn't catch the math in their europe P H D by age twenty five um and as far I know that the Youngest tender professor, a pan at twenty eight. So these are outrageous ragoust ly impressive um metros s of accomplishment.

But for you to share um a story about um less than optimal performance and how you just to do IT and and and the incorporation of the the second score um that you're referring to, I think is really appreciated because I think that um as much as we hear you know oh you know Jordan you know took many more you know free throws and everyone just thinks about all the he made. People think about all the one he made. That's the way the game works.

That's the way the mind works, I should say. So it's appreciate that you've flush IT out with the personal example I too would want to turn into a bar and disappear. I but I think that it's really impressive what you did. And and and he makes me think that the second score of getting a tenant at bringing the three and a half up, right, as IT were, is really about turning a score into a verb process, you know, over and over again, as i've do this podcast, and as i've taught in the classroom when I coming back to, is this idea that we should be focusing more on verbs and less on. Now we love to name things in category them.

But but when we start living life through A A lot of verb processes, so instead of getting being fit, we think about that you are running as a thing we really think about like just running right. IT becomes the less daunting and we accomplish for more. But the idea that um you know this has there are mathematical models of this, i'm sure but where you're busy talking about you know like an integral al, right? As opposed you're just some value.

You tell me about the slope with the line yeah right? So you are three and a half. How are you going to get to attend? gosh.

H, that's a huge and you're dealing with being back on your heel psychologically from getting all this you battering feedback from these are these highly comply individuals, all these literally wearing them, presumably on their body you to see and and it's really about creating it's about taking control the slope of that line from the three onward, and it's really a forward looking perspective. So I don't think we're being unduly a psychological here analytic. I think I think it's really about taking a moment state and a now and turning IT into a verb yeah .

I think that's right. Have some kind of the great philosopher homer simpson, who said that verbal weird language. So it's hard to talk about this and I swear .

IT and steel from the symptoms. But if they came from home or simpson.

i'm all for that small brain, small brain.

but you know, given the size of his brain that people in the image you know fairly, fairly robust knowledge. No, I think .

you're on to something. I think verbs are active and where we're drawn to them. I think yet a lot of times people review their past to work and they just they end up shaming an earlier reversion of themselves and they wallow in rumination.

And what what we want to try to do in that situation, which is easier said than done, is to say I like the purpose of no getting feedback or advice is not to shame my past self, is to educate my future self, which I think is very connected to allow the work and growth mindset that that you've been talking about in. There's been a fire start of controversy around can we teach growth mindset in schools lately. And I think what that is underscored for me is like you can't you can't expect someone to listen to one podcast episode or go through one workshop and magically believe that they're capable of learning anything at any moment. This is something we have to actively work on on a daily basis. In part of doing that, exactly, as you said, is thinking about the slip and saying, right, the person that i'm competing with is my past self, and I want to get a little bit Better today .

than I was yesterday yeah I think along lines of growth by incident, I will see we both know kl to act in respect or tremendous. Ly, I um and I realize there is some controversy now around how readily one can teach growth mindset tor and corporate growth mindset.

My understanding and love to know your thoughts on this is that when the dock work is combined with some of the ally chrome work, that is growth mindset is combined with acknowledge just a basic and true understanding that stress and the feelings of anxiety intention that um can actually be performance enhancing when those two things are combined. I think this is the work of David eager and colleagues at U T. Austin that indeed growth mindset becomes more visible in in our mindset and performance.

And are there other aspects of growth mindset and and other um other mindsets that are now being woven into that framework? That that can be helpful because I know. Gossip ever there was a great name for a area of psychology growth minds that tells you everything you want, everything you need and everything you have need to know and just the name um but uh we all find the difficult implement i'm just telling myself and not as good as something that could be yet IT sounds great but in moments of you know receiving feedback, that's harsh. Sometimes it's hard to access.

Yeah I is I think so the latest there's a magma at all analysis. And then so if that camp forces that the Carole and David camp have very different views on how big the effects are. But I think one thing that they seem to agree on is growth mindset is more important in circumstances where people are more likely to need IT.

So if you think about, for example, kids who are impoverish or marginalized communities, the message that you actually that you you are capable of, of evolving your skills to the that something you're bad at today, you could be good at next year is really important when you have never heard that before and when you don't have a single person believing in you. I think where um where we are often missing the boat is we think are i'm just to i'm going to steal this idea in a person's head and my work is done and we know that the context around you really matter. So actually carles done some research showing that a growth mindset is more likely to have an impact that when your classroom culture also and your teacher IT has the belief the kids are capable of learning and growing um that you know your starting ability is not fixed in any subject.

And I think we probably for all of us as individuals, what that means is we need to think about the the micro environ that we put ourselves in. I think you know the things I think you a lot about lately, a scaffold and the idea that when you when you're trying to improve with something, you don't need A A permanent teacher necessarily, you don't need one mentor or you guiding you for nine years. What you need is, is somebody who can give you the temporary support that allows you to to scale to a new height, just like a sa fold wood on a building.

And in learning theory, basically in the idea behind scaffolding is we're going to initially give you the support you need to solve a problem, and then we're gna slowly remove this support so that you learned to do IT on your own. And I think that those those kinds of scaffolding often missing so we install the growth mindset have got that belief in my head, but I don't know what I needed to do um to put that belief into action. And that's where I guess that that to me is we have to go behind mindset.

We have to think about how do we put people on a context that allows them to to put their beliefs in the practice. You are asking me, what else do we need like to support growth mindset and make IT affect IT, right? yeah. I mean.

we know people learn what gross mindset is. Is the idea that you're not as good at something yet? Okay, terrific. But it's very hard to implement in real time. There are have to presume additional tools that one can bolster the the growth mindsets worth make IT more accessible um and benefit permit.

yes. So just berg and immigration, I study this actually we did we were looking at growth mindset at work and just as well he's a stand for I don't know if you met him yet.

I have not, but big place, be on soon, if brilliant creativity .

researcher and amy just joined us, said at and and has fundamentally changed the way that I think about ideas in the way that you studied how we can shape our context and just done pathway king work there. And we were interested in growth mindset, and we we design an intervention where people could learn growth mindset at work.

So we taught them to think about how their skills were malual, how they could stretch their knowledge in the new areas. And we found that teaching them at that was not enough to boost their happiness or their performance. What we needed to also do was give them a growth mindset, not just about themselves, but also about their jobs.

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

And a lot of people, IT turns out, think their jobs are fixed by their job descriptions. But in fact, you have a ton of opportunity to say with me there's something there's a strength I have, but i'm not using IT right now is a way we can bring that in, in my work. And so in these couple experiments, we did when we random assign people to learn both that their jobs were valuable and that their skills were malual, they got a sustainable boost to their happiness that would last at at least six months.

There was no cost to their performance, meaning you could to redesign your own jo B2Be mor e enj oyable out wit hout a d ro p in the eff ectiveness of of you r con tributions to you r wor kplace. And I think what I I came away from that research realizing is, is not enough to just say, well, I can get Better, I can improve because very often you feel like your your environment is limited. Like great, I can grow, but i'm talking to dead and job is so what we need to do there is, is open up the opportunity for people to to to innovate on their own job description and then the growth mindset can begin to to have an impact.

Love IT sounds a bit like adding A S to gross growth mindset. So it's not growth mindset is growth mindsets because earlier you mention that in the classroom environment, if the teacher adopts a growth mindset, yes, as well as the students, well, then you have a culture of growth mindset. So it's the interconnected of this in the context in which the individual growth mindset exists. I have that right .

well put ah we ended calling a dual mindset but I think making an a plural is good because uh it's not I I have this image of um you know you put a person in in a cage and then tell them they're capable of growing still stuck in a cage. And so we we need to give them a chance to to push through those walls.

Super important. I hate to take us back to an earlier topic, but there's something that I meant ask you that I didn't and absolutely needed to ask you, which is your recent work or recent dish work was a few years back now, and you're so properly fix that I have to call IT a few years back the relationship between intrinsic motivation and performance on other tasks yeah yeah and the reason I ask is several fold um I did two episodes of the podcast on adhd and one of the things that I learned in talking to experts on a hd, people with A D H D.

As well as looking some other novel treatments, everything from behavioral to prescription job to even nutrition based, was that kids and adults with clinically diagnosed A D hd are actually terrific at paying attention to things that they really enjoy or that they're super interested in. So clearly, they have the capacity is just that they have deficits if you are in attending the things that are less exciting to them, less intreating to them. So if I were call correctly, you have a publication that explore the relationship between intrinsic motivation and performance and other stuff. And one of the major conclusions was that having a deep, deep interest in one thing might not be the best uh, condition for performing well at other less interesting test. Could you um could you tell us about that study, what what motivated you to Carry out that study and what some of the major takeaway .

were yeah that you summarize IT really well. I think original input is so this was another project with G. H. Chen and g. He came to one of the study in transit motivation. And we were talking about what do we know about entrance and motivation and what are the gaps in our knowledge.

And one thing that has always bothered me is when psychologists study something that sounds positive and they only study the benefits of IT, like there's no such thing as an unmitigated good, right? All, all sort of enjoyable experiences have costs. All unpleasant, the experiences can have benefits. We need to fill out this two by two of good thing, bad thing. Good outcome, bad outcome.

And so my chAllenge of her was, can you show me the dark side of intrinsic motivation? And SHE came back and he said, what if there's a cost of loving a task we hit you to hate a task that you don't like even more than you did before so I H that's an interesting idea. Attracts with the basic psychology of contrast effects uh where um you know if you eat something delicious than your least favorite food takes a little bit worse afterward.

And so let study that. So we had of getting data from from people at work. And then we also design experiment and shown off.

The more passionate you are in task one, the more your performance suffers if task two is really boring. And I guess what what this did for me is that made me think differently about test sequent ency. I used to wake up in the morning and do my most interesting task first, and then the grading was hell.

And when I do now is I start with a moderately interesting task. It's a little bit of warm t for me, and then I have an exciting one to look forward to. And if I do have a test that's boring but important, I think the performance is .

gonna suffer less interesting. And Normally don't ask about morning routines and how one structures of day because it's highly individual yeah and depends on people of kids and pets and the other. But i'll just share with you a brief and to dive a friend who's a very accomplished musician that has been for several decades now and he told me that he has a practice of after he gets off stage and he's like stadium stadium sell out level musician has been for a long time and shows no signs of stopping. Just incredible, but a very downer th person.

And he said one of the first things he does when he gets off stage is to go do some meaning task and that there's no way that's true but i've known his wife since college and SHE SHE. Verified that statement. Menial task your time.

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

He's tapering, okay, I think yeah yeah I I first.

while I was so struck by the fact that he had created this process for himself so long ago and he's also somebody who's not maintained has been the same marriage for extremely long time, is he was extremely happy in that and his family. I am when these bill that seems to thrive in all domains of life, and i'm certain that he struggles in some domain of life because everybody does, but sounds to me like a very unusual practice. But IT seems to kind of relate to this, that he has the thing he loves doing, playing music and performing in particular and he's just no point of one percent at doing that um just like bring himself back down to earth because so much of life and this what your family life is like dealing with the dish month in the inconvenience of everyday life yeah .

IT actually seems like what he's doing is he's resettle. This frame of reference to say if if I go right home then the contrast between this high obtain experience and having and sort of mottling through every day life um is going to be extreme. If I do something really small than family time is going to seem a lot bigger.

Yeah so I realized a bit of a leap from your study on international c motivation and low performance in in other domains. But you know to me cleaning up, clean a toilet is it's it's boring for all the wrong reasons, right? As you know, in, listen, I if had to do IT for a living, I would here, and I would try to do as well as possible. And but right, so well, I found that site to be particularly interesting because I think that these days we we glorify high performance, even peak performance, something we can talk about and we forget that um yes, often times people who are ultra high performers can afford to pay other people to do all the other stuff.

But I have to say in knowing some multa high performers and in knowing some people in the billionaire bracket know there is a high incidents of of mental health issues, Frankly, and a lack of satisfaction with life that maybe even comes from not um having to do anything besides the things that you find most intrinsically rewarding um we all think that oh I if I could, I spend all day doing the things that I find most intrinsically rewarding. But maybe there's something about this push pull. We know the brain that works and push pull with almost everything that having some experiences each day that are kind of like this thing. Again, do you think that heightens our level of satisfaction for the things we really enjoy?

I would be surprised if I didn't. I think I think contrast effects are very powerful. And we know, I mean, the is half a century of research on happiness suggesting that the comparison, once we make our what matter think I think tim urban probably put IT best when he said, happiness is reality minus expectations. And if you only have enjoyable experience, is your expectations are rising into perpetuity. So IT doesn't matter how good your reality is, you wanted IT to be Better and Better. I think one of things that Mandan experiences managed to do for us, or maybe Better way to say, is he wanted to benefit in hunting in experiences as they keep our expectations on the ground and allow us to be pleasantly surprised by a test that was more interesting than we expected, even though we didn't love IT.

What are you thoughts on what I call momentum, which is when I have an experience that pretium ly likely we record a podcast and really excited to get out in to the world, or if I have some experience that i'm left you very excited by at the end, that often times the energy. Again, i'm obsessed with this concept of neural energy. The energy that I gleam from that experience seems to have Carry over into other things.

No, going to be much more excited. Go across the street, get a cup of coffee, feels like a bigger thing than I Normally would. And I would think that one could kind of ride the wake of of a prior accomplishment, even a smaller complishment, each day, and make them know tiding up doing things that one would Normally find more boring, more boring.

Is that true? The way you're describing contrast effects makes you seem like it's more about Cliff, like that thing was great and now this thing, but I also going to ride high on on something that happened to three days ago, maybe even in two, three months ago. If so, feeling good equates to feeling good, or feeling good accentuates the the bad start.

This is the attention between contrast in spillover. And you can see both under different conditions. I think where this is, I think this is a brand new sort of I don't know anybody y's reconcile those two perspectives yet, but my hung from having worked on the contrast part of IT is we found that IT was only extreme intricacy tivo that had the performance cost another tasks.

So if you if you're enjoying something um if you like IT, that will give you a lift for other test where this is the best thing you have ever done. And now other things sucked by marrion. That's where we start to see you run into a problem. I also wonder um if there's a domain switching effect here. I think you're looting to this.

Um I I read some research that just came out this year are showing that um one of the benefits one of the surprising benefits of morning workouts is you actually have more confidence in your job because you get that small win, accomplish something this morning and that gives you a sense of africa y that you can Carry over into your you started to your work day a not to suggest that everyone should work out the morning and with you, I think everybody should. You both work and work out at the time that works for them. But I think I think there's something to be said for. Something went really well in one romm my life, and that boosts my belief in my capability to tackle chAllenges in a different rm.

What about in the opposite direction? You are a competitive diver. Um I have to presume that there were days when you had loud dies IT must have been been that that one .

day I like everyday .

and then you you leave you know your shower up dry off, had into the rest of your day. And you know, how do we segment away from the, you know, negative thought? I als of like something went really poorly.

And now you're often to the domain of life where you can do, you know how to do the things that you require to do. But maybe there's some chAllenges and learning involved. How do we cut motes between negative experiences?

I think, I mean, the ted lasso strategy is ideal, become a gold fish. Ten second memory, then don't even even recall the practice you had earlier today. I think that I don't know anybody who can do that consistently. And I think the more disappointing the experiences, the more you tend to to dwel on IT.

I think and when you talk about segmenting negative experiences, I think the probably the research that i've like best on this, and I just want to make sure capture this clearly um I basically so research on emotion regulation says there there two strategies that tend to be effective. One is distraction. The others is reframing.

Uh, so distraction is find something else that will consume your attention that's unrelated to the thing that you just bomb, dad. And the hope is that that that fits into the background. Reframing is a lot of what you were talking about a few minutes ago, which is okay.

Let me focus you know not on the level of my performance but slope um my dive in coach best a has really great set of questions that he he asks and I I remember I would finish practice the terrible day I just feel like and worthless as a diver and now diving was a big part of my identity. I let my team now, now my bad team mate, to my coaches, wasting his time. And now you, he could have been training somebody much Better, like, why am I doing this? And eric CD ash, did you make yourself Better today? And even if there was a bad practice, there is something that improved.

Yes, okay. And sometimes the answer feels like, no. And then he would ask, did you make someone else Better today? Yeah, I give a little tip to a teammate.

You know, I I made a joke that know that made everybody laugh and is like great then IT wasn't a bad day and I I think this is this is an example of what good reframing looks like um to say, okay, the goal wasn't to be great IT was to be Better. The goal wasn't necessarily just to make myself Better, was also to make other people Better. Um and I think those are the kinds of questions that seemed to segment pretty well.

I love that feedback, but I think we all gets stuck in those thought spiracles. And again, not to demonize smart phones because they are wonderful tools. But I have to remember the time i'm forty eight years old as of tomorrow, and I have to remember a time in which negative stuff was probably happening in the background.

But I didn't hear about IT because no one was texting IT to me. So i'd find out at the end of the day, when I still had time to do other things in the meantime, right? That said, I would also get negative experiences early in the day and then Carry them throughout the entire day.

When nobody is, you can get a positive text message that says, okay, I wasn't so bad or something like that. But um I do think is probably becoming apparent about these channels of communication are or either boons or disruptions to our our positive psychology is clear that we're just like bombarded at all the time. So just as as a practical question, what is your relationship to your phone? Do you set boundaries around your phone use, where the types of communications and activities that engage on your phone?

I do. So everyone I I think everyone I know has what to do list. I also have you to do list.

And unlike to do list includes I don't scroll on social media and I don't pick up my phone past nine pm. And those those two habits are enormously helpful, particularly the not scrolling ling. I pick up my phone when I have something to post. Or when I want to see what the comments are and then see if there's something interesting to learn or or somebody that I want to respond to um and that that becomes a really healthy boundary because I don't get stuck in one of these rabbit holes where of a sudden two hours of time I feel like I feel like wasted my time.

But where do you post or keep your to do in your to do list? Do you keep them on your phone?

Now it's a word document. I am my computer.

okay. So you're still at the computer screen quite bit each.

Yeah, okay. I feel like that's where most of my good thinking and writing happens.

Yeah, I Carry small notebook around with me now and right things down. I just curious. So yeah, I like one of those. Yeah.

I no phone.

right? Yeah I can be problematic for me, especially with with voice recognition now because just it's hard to go back in a systematic way for me but i'm a big believer in these these things that for those listening and I watch, i'm hold up a pen pen probably right some of the research .

also showing that you have a Better memory for information when you take notes by hand.

My keyboard um I didn't know that, but i'm very, very gratified to hear that. So and I suppose if you don't have a pen and you don't have a pencil handy, then blood always works. Just kidding, i'm just kind, don't don't make yourself for anyone else bleeds just to get idea down.

But IT is amazing how sometimes we will have ideas while running, walking, showing out and about, and then later trying to recall those ideas if we don't write down their god. The great joe drummers from the clash talked about the critical importance of Carrying around a small notebook such as you did, because he said that the ideas fall down like rain. And if you catch them there, there, but if you miss them, they truly won't be there later.

And that there's something kind of area about that like why wouldn't be able to remember these potential? James of ideas, right? The guider ing up of the mind. We had a guest on this podcast for a serious doctor, paul county psychiatrist, and he talked extensively about the unconscious mind.

I mentioned this little earlier, but one of things that really stuck with me, as he said, you know, everyone thinks that the prefrontal cortex and the frontal cortex is the supercomputer of the human brain. That's context planning strategy, switching at sea. At sea, certainly its valuable real estate to our intellect and all our abilities.

But he said, you know that the real supercomputer is the unconscious mind. However, that unconscious mind that lives below the surface of our awareness is also what drives a lot of our unconscious defences. So are so called blind spots. So projection, project identification, you know, these, these can be both good or bad, they can serve as well, or or really, and so on and so forth.

But implied in this notion of the unconscious and blind spots is that we can become aware of things unless we either do dedicated work to become aware of them, or even Better, will be dedicated work where we are asking other people to say, hey, listen, you have a blind spot and IT is black, black and black. So tell us a about the role of blind spot, maybe in some positive aspects of having blind spots, but more importantly, what we can do to fill in those blind spots and perhaps also explain how how they can limit us. And if you have any examples that um from the research where people overcoming their blind spots that benefit them, that would be amazing.

Yeah yeah, there's a lot there. Let me well, let me start passing. I think a lot of people think about blind sport in terms of heroics and biases. So you think about confirmation biases.

You think about the the classic economy to versy work ah that entered up putting Daniel nobel prize on the way in which um we are intuitive judgments um often get anchored in the way we've done things before or you we focus on the information that telling and available to us and overlook less obvious information. I've come to think that the the mother of all biases is what I think of is i'm not biased bias. It's secondly called the bias blind.

Scott and Emily proud and colleagues researched. But the idea is that I think i'm more objective than other people and you may have your you may have flaws. You're thinking, Andrew, but me like I see things clearly and rationally and I think that this is it's a really dangerous meta bias because the moment you believe you're not biased, you are incapable of seeing any of your biases. Um so in some of the research on the bias lines, but you see that that people who have who score high and conditional ability tests so high I Q are actually more likely to fall victim to that. I'm not bias bias because they've been reinforced for a lifetime ah that they're really smart and they're .

good at thinking about we don't talk about current events on this podcast much, but the six some current events people that were told their entire careers that they are perfect or near perfect and circumstances eventually came to your slam them hard into the concrete .

on that one or or in some cases that hasn't happened yet. But but we watched them hurdling tour earth. Um so I I worry a lot about that.

So I think the beginning of of seeing any blind spot is recognizing that we all have blinds about is part of being human. Um I think that the brighter side of that is that we're not just blind to weaknesses, were also blind to our strength. So jane datta and lower Morgan Roberts and colleagues did some research on the reflected best self portrait.

This is one of my favorite exercises to do in the classroom, but also to do in workplaces. Sometimes even people end up doing IT with their kids at home. The idea that you do have strength, that you're not that aware of a there maybe things that come naturally to you that you don't even realize are hard for other people.

They maybe things that are struggles for you um and so you you think it's hard do and therefore reign bad at IT, but other people watch you do IT and realized you're actually quite good at IT. So the you need other people to hold up a mirror to see what these invisible strength AR. So the way that will reflect the best self exercise works is you're ask to contact ten to twenty people who know you well in different walks of life, a family member, a couple of friends, colleagues, and then you ask them to tell a story about a time when you are your best and you collect these stories.

It's it's the most exciting week of email you will ever get twenty now. So let me tell you how great you are. But with key this goes back to our discussion of feedback earlier, is they're really specific about a moment when you are at your best. And then your job is to collect all the stories and do the pattern recognition exercise and ask what are the common themes that i've seen through these stories. And it's it's a really powerful and vivid way of of getting a sense of what are those strength.

And it's not surprising that in some of the research, when people go through this process, they end up with much more clarity, not only about what they're what they are good at and where their potential lies, but also how do I what do those situations have in common where I was able to use my strengths and how do I get myself in those situations were often? How do I create those situations more often? I'll give you a personal example on this.

So I I got a bunch of feedback that I was good at helping other people see their strength. And if that okay, I don't feel like have enough opportunities to use that strength in my daily life. So what i'm going to do about this, and I ended up flipping the exercise upset down, and I picked one hundred people who are really mattered to me, and I wrote a stories to each of them about the time when they were at their best.

And is no reason I can't. I can't make this part of my day is probably probably one of the best weeks of my life. IT was Better than getting the stories was was giving them.

And I got to his notes back from people saying, I I didn't realize I didn't remember that thing that happens. But I think for me, who is an example of saying, okay, you know, i've i've always enjoyed trying to bring out the best in others. I don't feel like at the time I was was a first year doctoral student.

I don't feel like I had anything to contribute to others. I'm trying to learn how to understand this field and do a worthwhile study and right a paper i'm not teaching yet. I have no value to add and getting this feedback like, oh, you're somebody who helps other people see their potential.

Let me let me take some people that I I already recognize really amazing things in, and let me just tell them that. And IT took me about a week to write the hundred emails, and I can't think of a week i've spent Better. Wow, is so interesting .

that you flipped the process on its head a bit or a lot, and that ended up being the reward. Do you think you learned anything about given that I was IT early in your academic career? Do you think you learn anything about your a particular talent or desire to to do what you do?

now? I mean, it's so much of what you describe that seems to map well to what you do now. I mean, you could be if you were to choose or chosen just not just but a laboratory scientists doing experiments. Um you're clearly still doing that at with a tremendous productivity, but you've also decided to tell the world about the information that you're gathering and the work of a lot of other people as well as our feelin's here because we both do this much .

more interesting to say other people's work and talk about what you already .

know IT is indeed and it's fun to be able to to once understanding of the process into you, like what are other people doing and know how hard IT is to do IT really good experiments and be able to spot really good experiments. But did you learn in that early stage of your career that I think I want to do this later? Because what you do now is that maps pretty well until what you just described.

I don't think there was IT wasn't Christal ised at the time, but I was definitely one of those seeds that was planned that must have grown because I I remember read after I got tender, a wonderful colleague and asked if I would buy a book with him. I was so flattered. And I went in to talk to my underground research lab later that day.

And I. I mentioned off hand head and I cut this inviting and to write this book. And they freed out out like, no, you can not write somebody else book.

You have to write about your ideas first. If you're going to write a book, write your own book. And I I was very resistant because I love other people's ideas.

No, I would. I feel like what I do best. I think I was a boy, ea, who wrote about the scholarship of discovery versus the scholarship of integration. And I never felt like I was a eua blindness original insight person. And I felt when I was good at was synthesizing ideas.

And you kind of taking a bunch of pieces of cloth and and showing them into a quit and allowing people to see the big picture in a way they had before. And I felt like I could do that with a college who was already a successful author. And my students basically held me hostage.

And I said, you've been doing this research for for over a decade now, and you have a responsibility to share that outside your classroom. And IT reminded me of that experience of saying, okay, there's something I see in other people I want to share IT with them and maybe I could do that on a broader scale. So yeah, I think there was there were definitely dose that connected there.

He knows a master student at berkely. There was a guy who has now moved to mission in state. Mark breed love, who I hope to host on the podcast, actually is really interest, really interesting work on the biology of sexual differentiation.

And I think that's an invite .

if you're listening, right? And he um IT is indeed and he said to me, he said, you know review articles provided they are written by people who um are credential in a given field are cited at you know hundred dex anyone particular paper. Now at the time I wasn't interested in uh impact factors.

In fact, i've never paid any attention. Impact factors they they're importance varies in in different countries and um in the us they play some role um more so in europe. But I I could care less about impact factor Frankly because those those matrix aren't what it's going to Carry you through the divulge of designing and Carrying out a hard experiment, you have to be intrinsically curious about the answer, right? You and I know this but um but he basically said, uh uh something is really support your point um which is that ultimately the the ability synthesize information is can feel um really good and he was started talking about the feeling that he got from doing that. He's also tremendous end scientists as well.

In any event, i'm so glad that you flipped that exercise on its head because now the world gets to benefit from you doing that for us all the time because I I realized now that much of what you do is to help people identify and a race their blind spots by um and I love your social media channels um and I noted on instagram and I do grow but I scroll through into your your channel to um you'll put up in short form content that that really highlights the key importance of people embarking on strategies that they wouldn't reflexively take. I see that over and over again. It's like we think that the best leaders do blank, but actually the research says they do exactly the opposite and and you will have a vast kit of those so along those lines, you know what are some of the most common blind spots that um you observe and that people could benefit from understanding and and doing contrary action around as IT relates to, let's say, interpersonal relations in the workplace or at home.

And and maybe we could see this with finding that you've also written about, which is that you know people who have an exert a lot of proficiency and even control in their professional life well, sometimes bring that to their relationship life. And that doesn't work, right? The idea that like being in charge and being confident is a great, is a great set of attributes. But IT can really fail us in other domains. Can we leave that in .

with blind spot? Yeah, we can. So I think that so one of things I found over the past few years is that, and this was inspired by a film that lock frame a lot of us, spend a lot of our time thinking like preachers, prosecutors or .

politicians, preachers, prosecutors. 对。

yeah so you can think about this as as three mental modes that even if you never worked in any these careers, you you will watch your thinking colored by at least one of them more often than you would like.

So in put your mode, you're basically propertized your own views and you I mean ander, you're in some situations I think of you as a highly effective professional deep bonker of preachers of you know certain kinds of snow oil when IT comes to health and and biology. Um sometimes you take that too far and people might accuse you of being a prosecutor where you're attacking other people's views. And then um the third mode, politician mode is is basically you don't bothered to listen to people unless they are agree with your views.

What I think is is interesting is these these modes of thinking are adaptive for in in certain roles. So preachers make great sales people. They're often in visionary leaders.

Prosecutors are often highly effective scientists, right? We excel IT criticising other people's work and finding what's wrong with IT. Politicians are greater currying favor.

They do a lot of lobbying. They win approval. The problem is that all of these modes stop you from questioning your own assumptions and beliefs.

So I, my biggest voice is prosecuted mode. Um i've been called a logic bully. My wife had to explain me that was not a compliment. I think I I know you've experience too. If I feel confident that they are strong evidence that somebody is wrong, I believe this is my moral responsibility to correct them.

and that never goes well. amazing. I won't reflect on my own experience. I'll just say yes and yes, right, right? The logic work in ja mode is one that I think we're trained in as academics. We aren't that and you know or for your lawyer or you know many other professions as well. And I think that holds value and IT can be very effective in certain domains but less effective in other domains.

Yes, I think part of the problem when I actually whether you're preaching prosecuting or politic actually are politically, you look like you're not open because you've already in all cases, you think you're right and other people are wrong. And so that makes IT really hard for other people to to reason with you, to disagree thoughtfully with you.

So my favorite alternative, and this is at the heart of what you do for a living and for fun, is thinking like a scientist. And when I say thinking like a scientist, I do not mean that you need to buy a microscope or invest in a telescope. What I mean is, is as you model so effectively, a good scientist has the humility to know what they don't know and the curiosity to constantly seek out knowledge.

There have been multiple experiments showing that when people are taught to think like scientists, their judgment improves and so of their decisions and I think a lot of that stems from um when you go into scientists mode, you realized that all of your opinions are just hypothesis waiting to be tested. All of your decisions are experiments. And so well, i'm not trying to prove that i'm right.

I'm trying to find out if I might be wrong. And then if I find out I am wrong is easier to pivot. And instead of being really invested in being right, I can try to get IT right. And I think in some ways, that's the that's the metal message that i'm trying to community to people with my work is um assumptions are meant to be pressure tested. They're meant to be questioned and chAllenge. And if you're not open to rethinking your views um then you basically turn thinking into a religion uh and I don't know about you but I prefer to base my few and i'm good data um as opposed to blind faith um and I think that's been a huge part of your contribution in the last three years. So years to public discourses you have you've help people think more scientifically and talk more scientifically about their daily habits and behaviors than I guess my magic question is how do we help people do that more often even in domains where they don't have access to scientific knowledge and they don't read journals first?

Well, thanks for the kind words of feedback. I think my my goals always to identify who's coming. The pod caster held tools and protocols and hopefully teach them some science and scientific thinking. And for those are covering to the park, cast for science and scientific thinking, hopefully they get some hell tools and protocols also.

But because I fall love of science for exact reason that you're describing, which is that I I lived, I grew up in a family that was very divided politically, along religious lines, along essentially every line, like what foods to eat, what was healthy, what. And the only way I could reconcile these very, Frankly, polarized views was to embark on the scientific method, post hypothesis, and then try disprove once hypothesis, and some things get through the filter. And it's a constant learning.

So um I should just ask when you teach people how to be a scientist in order to try to overcome some of the blind spots and be Better thinkers, Better meaning IT serves themselves and the people around them Better is that teaching them with a hypothesis that of a hypothesis is not a question. It's it's sort of a um your wager on an idea with the understanding that you very well could be wrong and then you try to disprove that idea is that that sorry, the crux of of what in these experiments is you're describing as teaching people how to be yes, if they just do that, then they are they're going to benefit. I think that's .

that's at the very heart of the lens is I wanted just double click on the idea of disproving your hypothesis. Most people live in a land of confirmation by us where basically just looking for support for their preexisting beliefs.

That's right, they're click for gen. We all do this. By the way, i'm not criticizing here. We all have an idea.

And then we will click for a joon line to support the idea that we disagree with them. They did disagree with us. I here, somebody I agree with and that agrees with me, I think. And do you think this has roots in our, you know, in the neural circuit underpinnings of of just wanting to have a filling ation that a filling ation feels good, you know, having people that are like us knowing that we're come protected in that yeah.

I think that's a big part of that. I think when the reasons that we we in case ourselves in echo chAmbers and hidden filter bubbles is ah there's there's a strong evolutionary pressure to avoid social exclusion. And so it's it's not just being drawn to affiliation. It's also um I I really want, i'm afraid uh being x communicated from my group and if I chAllenged the orthodoxy of the community that I belong to, I might be an outcast. I don't think I don't think every day people think through that logic, but I think there there a deep seated visual tendency to avoid that.

And yeah I think the when we think about teaching people to see their blind spotts more clearly, a lot of that is is recognizing it's hard to do that on your own um because by definition, your blind spots or are invisibly you and so this is why other people is input is so important. And I think you know I know this makes a lot of people uncomfortable, but I think everybody on social media should follow people that they disagree with, but not just for the sake of IT. You want people who reach different conclusions from you, but where you respect the integrity of their thought process.

Those are the people who really stretch your thinking. And I think that's what we are trained to do. What I was trained to do, the social sciences, a social scientist, is, listen, the ideas that made me think hard, not just the ones that made me feel good. And to surround myself with people who chAllenge my thought process, not just the ones who have validate my conclusions. And I think, you know, a lot of people hear that message and like, no, but I don't want to let that like that awful perspective in my world and no, you want to be more numerous in saying, who are the people where before I knew what their answer was, I would be impressed with the depth and the thoroughness of their reflection and their analysis. I should be following those people and learning from them, regardless of the the hypothesis that they generate and the results that they share.

I'm so glad you mention the importance of following people that you disagree with. I think one thing that we have to highlight and hoping will maybe even emerging from this conversation is that follows are not endorsements and and this is actually a real problem. I mean, there are academic.

We've lost their jobs. Not necessary for following certain accounts but for commenting on certain common threads. Maybe even like is is a slightly different category because it's as the name is suggest, it's a like is that IT sounds like and it's thought of as a vote of approval of what's there.

Yeah but when one's the options are just um you know a heart a follow or no heart no follow. No, I was a big fan of the thumbs up, thumbs down. I got to like the thumbs comes down because at least you have you have an option to to um to dissent without getting in in online comment battle and things that sort.

But listen, i've had um people ask me, why do you follow so and so because followers are also seen as a sign of support because you're adding adding followers and personally in the algorithms ising prominent to a channel. But i'm right there with you follow a lots of accounts of people who have fundamentally disagree with. But i'm trying to learn and i'm also trying to understand what what their capture points are like, why people find them so intriguing. Yes, anyway, I am a learner, i'm a forrid or like you.

So i'm in the same boat and everyone's a while. I think it's stunning to me. I don't know if you've ever looked at your your instagram statistics, but somebody, a coach might actually showed me. I didn't realize you could look at the effect of each post and follows and unfolding. Ws.

I didn't realize that.

And you know, I think that my typical aso might be two or three to one for a post. So you gaining two or three to two or three followers, everyone that I lose the idea that I could post to anything that would cause someone to and follow me like if I said something interesting enough that you thought I was worth following, how could how could one post change your mind about that?

I think you're too focused on what I think and maybe not paying attention to how I think was my my first reaction to that. And my second my second thought was, well, maybe maybe what's happening here is people show up and they don't realize the foundation of evidence behind the total body of work. And so one post he has strikes them wrong, and they think this person is not credible, or they think that this person has, you know, lost side of you of what rigorous science is.

I wonder if you've had that experience to of, I think I make a mistake of taking for granted that anybody who followed me knows that if I post something, I think it's worth thinking about. And you know it's it's been carefully studied and I didn't have I didn't have a dog in the fight. I read this research and said this clear the bar not only of an journal, but I read the methods, and I found them sound enough that we ought to be discussing this idea. Um have you had that experience to?

I certainly have. And I should say that I was wind in an academic culture, three separate mentors, very different styles. All of them were excEllent, and but all of whom taught me that, you know, there are phenomenal papers, were every bit of information in the paper.

And indeed, how it's written from start to finish is just water tight and incredible. And there are other papers that are less water tight, but occasionally there will be papers where one data point in a figure is intriguing enough to consider following that trail in your own work. Even if the rest of the paper is kind eh I mean, one data point now that doesn't mean taking one data point casting IT out too millions of people on social media as an actionable item is valid.

That certainly not what i'm saying, but what I do realize and i'm realizing again now for what you just said, is that indeed people don't know the context in which like what filters are we working with before we bring things forward. And I think that my belief is that if it's grounded firmly in the scientific method that um that's the best starting place. We are talking about that earlier.

And I also understand that scientists different tremendously and how they look at even the same data in the same paper. So there is no governing body that says, okay, this paper means blank. The authors have their interpretation.

The students have their interpretation. In fact, the course I used to teach graduates, which grew into a very large course, we would learn to ask four questions. What's the question that the authors were asking? Sometimes a sub question.

What methods do they use? What did they find and then what did they conclude? And does IT relate back to the original question and that simple um breaking out of four questions of study, essentially what I do for all studies.

But I have my way of doing that and it's going to differ the way that other people do IT um social media uh I think what's interesting is that I think there's always going to be a core following of of a given person like your followers that they're going to trust you, not as so across the board, but there's a general acceptance of ideas coming through. I think they are on social media. It's hard to strike a baLance between setting the whole context and the action. Take ways I get criticised a lot for not being concise enough and I agree but but I also get you for putting things taking things out of contact so such A T it's a tight rope walk and it's always going to be a tight rope walk and so I wanted to just keep going and I know you will too um and and listening I there's there's some kids out there surely not can be for they're going to take our jobs eventually and we'll find a way do you much Better who knows .

through AI or .

something like that maybe robots. I feel like this isn't an appropriate place to ask about something else once we're talking about to the perception of of others and and cleaning information. Overcoming blind spots is something that you have written about some years ago now I guess that would be almost eight years ago now. Um about authenticity. Um you know the word authenticity is such A D field, such a man field.

I was going to say such as such a positive gravitation pool like oh, they really authentic is supposed to what's the opposite of authentic fake right but um I think we could all learn to draw some lines between authenticity and over sharing, right? How do we engage authenticity and we can wait for people to that article you wrote some years ago. I think you may have written IT differently were to be written today but you talked to that article about somebody who essentially decided to tell everyone that he worked with all the things that he was interested in um doing with them relating to them and I did not serve him well.

And so that's all right. And so then there's this this notion of benevolent deception in order to preserve relationship. And orange IT brought about a word that we don't hear about very often, but that I rather like, which is like, there's so for social media, by the way, I apply classroom rules.

I'll tolerate any comment in the comment section, but not the sort of comment that I wouldn't tolerate in a classroom. You started insulting other and insult me, but if you wanted insult other people, i'm not going to tolerate that. So um that's where I draw line. Classroom rules, there's an adequate and I think that um adequate is important. So how do we baLance authenticity with adequate and also with preserving one's one's public life or private or private life of entity at home seems important to be your complete self at home, except when you want to, you know, physically hit your sister, brother because they your ice cream. That's not the right of authenticity.

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

good so good and I think I think .

what people forget is that we have we multiple selves I do you know this your whole career, we all have multiple identities. We also can think about yourself as your thoughts, your emotions um your values, your personality. So which faster of yourself if you're trying to be true to um I would argue that authenticity without boundaries is careless.

Authenticity without empathy is selfish and part of being authentic is caring about other people's values that should be one of your values. So what that means completely is I don't think we should worry about being authentic to what we're thinking and feeling in any given moment. I think what we want to ask is what i'm about to do or say consistent with my principles.

And sometimes that means you will be false to your personality in order to be truly your values. Sometimes that means you will you will feel like you're not honoring you're thoughts or you're emotion in the moment, but you're doing that with a broader view toward who is the person that I want to be. There was a cultural critic line trilling wrote about the idea of sanity as opposed to authenticity.

And I really like this distinction. He said, when you try to think about being authentic, you're trying to bring the inside out. And two point energy that's not always appropriate or effective.

He said. Sincere is a little bit more about bringing the outside in. So pay attention that the person you claim to be and then try to become that person.

And there was a little bit in a hut moment for me. I realized there there are all these people who say, well, you should, you know you you should walk your talk and I think that's good advice. I might even go a step further and say, you know, maybe you should only talk IT if you're already walking IT.

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

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

A guest, unlike free's podcast, who, watching the security of world, said that one of the lesson that he teaches as kids as to not film themselves doing bad things, but, and of course also not to do bad things, but in general, to just not film themselves doing anything because of his understanding of the risk of of doing that. And we don't want to create a paranoia, but god, I mean, who you are when you're fourteen is a very different person than who you are when you twenty seven, when you're fifty. So I hope so so you know and is so yeah I think you know balancing of entities across the life span.

And we're expected Young minds to do this. And clearly older minds can do IT either. I mean, this is a pretty woman case of a chair of a major py, the major psychiatry department. Um we won't name the university but um basically lost his job for a single tweet. He just was not being thoughtful. In fact he was being really like them to to other people and lost job and and I think he said I don't know him um and he was obviously he lost I don't think he was devised but um actually think about somebody who is a chair psychic, which means they're psychic atrix, which means they are trying to think about thinking.

And there you go. And it's amazing how common this is. And I think what of things that fascinating to me is, I guess goes back to us something we retired about a moment ago. But I I think that when when we communicate, we have access to the same total of all of our thoughts and everything we've ever, ever said that we can remember and we forget that other people on the have a snapshot.

So one of the questions I like to ask is, if this was the only post that somebody saw of mine would ever be proud of IT, would you communicate who I am and who I aspire to be so good? The answer is no. Maybe I should pause before I put that out .

that that is excEllent advice if you were the only post like you're one and only representing you and now that could .

be paralysing if you're protection ist, you'll never post. But I think for somebody who's posting regularly, it's a good filter to just ask I am I being thought ful enough?

So good. Add anything to that? I'll just say, so, so good. Let's talk about potential.

I was in junior high school, and I remember having a social studies teacher who said he just would go on and on about potential. He has special program. After school, you could involve potential potential tension.

And we hear about this. We have on tap potential. You hear we're only Operating at forty percent of our abilities.

You know, people say that the implication is that we have reserve wars of potential that we're just not accessing because we're not doing the right things, thinking the right things. I know you've now researched this topic extensively. Even you book on this topic um tell us about potential.

Like do we all have huge reservoir of potential that where we are not accessing? And of course, I and everyone else wants to know how can we access those. But maybe you will also tell some of the myths around potential and and tell us about tell us about potential. Such, such a sticky topic for all the right reasons.

Thank you know, it's two. One of those things where you've had this experience, i'm sure many times where you start thinking and talking about the topic and you realize it's it's been your whole life. You didn't see IT until then.

And I feel that way about potential. I think that i've been passionate about helping people achieve their potential as long as I can remember. I think every, every goal i've ever said hasn't been about stretching my potential in one way or another, or at least realizing IT.

And what I become so struck by, as i've studied this topic, is we all have had in potential, but we don't know how to one market. So why do we often underestimate our own potential? We judge ourselves by us, by our starting abilities um and this is more common for people with fix mindsets, but even people with growth mindsets.

Um you try a new skill IT doesn't go well and you think this is not for me. I'm not caught up for this. And then IT gets worse when other people also, you know, you're not just underestimate yourself, you're also being underestimated by others.

Other people watch you and say, yeah, you don't have the know, you're not a protege. You're not a natural. You don't have the talent that IT takes. And I think the big myth there is that raw talent is the most important driver of how high people climb. It's not motivation and opportunity a matter more than rabble for growth motivation .

and opportunity yeah .

obviously everybody starts to a different point um but how close you come to your potential is much more about the character skills cultivate to improve and improving over time and then whether you're in a situation where you you have access to the knowledge that you need and the tools you need to keep growing. And so yeah a concrete example this for me is I I started diving. I was way too late. I picked IT up as a teenager. A lot of the elite divers in the world start .

by five goodness actually.

in china there, their hand packed for body type and sent to a version of diving boarding school where they don't even teach kids how to swim. They tie rope around them so that they can just pull them back after after they they hit the water .

in deep end part there by the tie rope around.

And I think it's their waste.

So they're diving with a rope. So when they get the water, they're not wasting any energy exactly. They're just being drags through the water and out.

That is my understanding of IT. wow. But prison.

they have to walk, they have to climb. Yeah, kay. But in other things.

swiming currently is very secondary anyway. So I started really late, and I lacked most of the things that you would want as a diver. I I couldn't touch my toes without any minus.

Uh, my teammates called me Frankenstein because I was so stiff when I walked. So lack in the flexibility. I have no rythm. My coach brought a metronome to practice one day and I couldn't even keep the beat so you know you think about diving is a sport of Grace note and then I also couldn't jump and I couldn't twice either. And like you're missing the explosive of power, you don't have the the athleticism.

Um and I think if I if I had just looked at those abilities and no business being a diver and in fact no business being an athlete, I already been cut from the medical baseball team three times. I didn't make the high school socket team those with two sports I poured a decade into. This is going nowhere, eric, just the most incredible coach I could ever imagine. He said to me on the first day of practice, he said, you know, yes, you're missing all these things, but I believe if you if you pour yourself into the sport, that you could be a state finalist by the time you finish high school. And he saw more potential than me than I saw myself, and that just little fire under me.

And you know, what that translated into is a lot of the behaviors that that you and I both studied, setting specific difficult goals for I want to learn these dives that seem out to reach um for you know I want to increase my score over the next three minutes by ten points um for I want to learn how to you know all my limitations that was standing one thing that I can master, that i've total control lovers. How clean I go into the water, I can get a rip entry so that there's no splash and that's the most important part of the dive and the one of the greatest compliments ever got as the diver was, I came out of the meat in as a couple years, then I think, as IT may be a junior high school. And one of the judges turned to eric and said, all he can do is rip. And eric said, so yes.

it's also so almost like saying all you can do is win.

No, IT was a great package of compliment but articles like, listen, he made the dive. IT has a degree of difficulty. Maybe he didn't jump as high as you wanted.

Maybe his his talk wasn't as tight as you wanted, but at the end of the day, like that dive disappeared, strait up, down in the water. You cannot give that to seven. And that didn't observing me really well. And so I think that the broader lesson here for me was area said to me, actually last year, I never thought about this, he said, ah, but I never got close to even qualifying for olympic trials.

I did not have the talent to be that good, but I got way Better than ever expected in eric said to me, he said, looking back, he said, you've got further with less talent than every any diver have ever coached. And that was so meaningful to me. And when IT reminded me, was my product accomplishments were not in the areas where I started out with the most talent.

They were in the areas where I had overcome the most obstacles. And I think that to me is really what drives people around potential is to say it's not performance that motivating. It's a sense of progress.

I love that story, and I and I could not agree more. I mean, I think, or knows my favourite topic and sciences, the course ci performed at least after my fresh man year, which was a visible least well in the face when I was doing well, is neural development. I now teach neural development, neural .

development first.

Um okay. Well, I have to put in context my high school and fresh when you are called for a baseball, right basically no place being there. I can only think my high school girlfriend for um being so wonderful that I followed her after college and ended up there left after my fresh new year came back and then at that point I was like a step function.

I worked out of fear and excitement and love of the material. I was a straight student there after but in my senior senior year, excuse me, I took a course in neural development which was extremely chAllenging um and I got A B plus. And that b plus still get to me, you know.

But it's a topic that I love the most is what I did my graduate thesis sons, what I teached at stanford, among other topics. And and I like to think now I have a st humilities like considerable mastery over over the the material, but it's because I didn't do as well as I would have liked and I applied myself so much and I think that IT just income actually to me. And then then show over time you you kind of get IT or you get um you get IT um so but it's still my favorite topic because IT was that friction point, right? It's the racing through and there's something I don't know.

It's just so intrinsically satisfying to me. I used to watch my bulldog master costell like chewing on a bone, or when he was all on a brick, know that kind of a homer simpson brain about his object choice to chew on. And he wit, and he just look like he was in just total bliss. IT was like this effort, combined with some intrinsic pleasure of the process. And so I think that when one is rattling through something that's hard, IT feels so good, that is almost Better than the outcome like IT IT is Better than the outcome .

I I think is and you it's fascinating because this is why i'm always bothered by people saying played your strengths because if you do that, you would gravitate or toward the things that come naturally to you and you're onna miss out on the very often.

The skill that was hard for you to learn to your point is one that you end up with grater mastery over because you had to put in the extra effort and you end up arriving more, more satisfaction out of the fact that you this was really tough and I figured that out um you implicit in your story um and maybe partially explicit in some parts um I I was looking for character skills that helps people realized their potential and really fuel unexpected growth. Ended finding three that I think are under discussed and and well supported by science. Um I think that basically if you want to reach your potential or actually be more than you think you're capable love, we're looking at becoming a creature of discomfort um and embracing things that are unpleasant or awkward for you.

Uh well will be the first thing. The second is is being a bunch and soaking up new information and also filter filtering out what might not be useful. And then the third is, is being an imperfections ist, which is knowing when to aim for excEllence and when to settle for good.

And I hear all of those themes in your story. Um you know that was obviously uncomfortable. You like gotto be plus you don't want to do any more neural development.

IT was so frustrating and so exciting to me at the same time. And then I went. Everything I did in the five or seven years that followed was all about learning more about this topic because and IT wasn't about performing well or proving myself I just I I love the material so much more because of how chAllenging IT was and i'm grateful to you bend the professor you see some of our incredible neuron atomium and teacher of neural development and laboratory scientists because um you know I think had I gotten an N A, I don't know that I would have phone in love with that in the same way. Isn't that weird?

You wouldn't had to work at IT to discover what was fun about IT, I imagine?

No, absolutely. And it's still want my favorite topics to teach and learn about so invention discomfort being a sponge slash filter if I got that right and an imperfections ist um yeah tell me more about the imperfections ist piece because I feel like um i've had students in my lab and i've known people in other omair of life that they are they're absolutely paranoid ed, about shipping something out for the world to see and of course, like no one wants to put stuff out into the world that isn't right and got format could be wrong.

But or. That's going to embarrass us so you can understand why people are perfectionist. But I never really understood that the the extreme perfection is like, how do they ever do anything and and they are happy people because I can mention, no, I mean.

this is so Thomas current, I think, is the world's little leading psychologists study perfectionism. And if you look at his met analysis, perfectionism is a recipe for burnout and depression and anxiety because you're constantly comparing yourself to an ideal that's unachievable um perfection ist um or not. They do get Better grades in school slightly, but they don't do any Better at work.

Then there appears because I think in school, you have a predictable outcome. You have a general sense of what's going to be on a test. And if you study hard enough, you can come closer to the a plus, where, as at work, performance is much more nebulous.

And so what happens to perfection tiss a lot of times is they end up optimizing the things that are predictable and controllable. And then you sort of missing the forest in the trees. And I think the you know the antidotes um as far as I know really have to to do with calibration.

So I talked earlier about how I like to ask for a zero to ten to find out am I am the ball Parker or not? Well, biggest the liability as a diver was, I was never satisfied my score and one day air said to me, you know you you hear olympic judges talk about your commentators talk about the perfect ten. That's a mno mer.

Um if you look the diving robo, a tennis for excEllence, not for perfection, there is no such thing as a fallback dive. I can look at dives that i've got to strike tens and point out eighteen things that were wrong with them, but they were excEllent. And so then we had to define the standards of excEllent.

So what I have as a recovering perfectionist, somebody who you know just deep myself up constantly, fact I got, we did paper play the words on my swim team. And one year I was given the if only award and there's a look carony. And if only I point in my left pinky toe, I won't gotten an eight and a half instead of an eight.

And that was like the story, my diving career, and I did not want to be that person anymore. And so one of things i've learned to do is when I start anything, if I set down to buy a book, a amin for and nine. And the reason for that is i'm in a poor a couple years of know my worklife into this topic.

Hopefully a lot of people who are going to read IT. And I want to make sure it's truly the best work I can produce. Social media post i'm okay with a seven if i'm always shooting for a nine, i'm not going to post very often because .

you're nine you're ceiling for nine is or your threshold for nine is is so exceeding yeah and .

I wanted to keep getting higher over time. My idea of the nine today is much more chAllenging than IT was ten years ago. And I think this is this is what people probably don't do enough, especially if you're an extreme perfectionist, is they don't realize, okay, me figure how important this task is. And then for this task, as six is efficient, so that then I can pour my energy into appalling, the seven and a half toward and nine, where IT really matters. And inevitably, if you don't do that, what you will do is you will get a bunch of lines, things that are completely trivial.

I went to a high school where we had a couple kids get perfect on the S. A. T.

They would have big, like center ford list of all the early admissions to all the fancy ivy schools. Tiffany was not on that list. I don't even know if I the, oh no, that was anywhere near that list. Probably not. And some of them have gone on to have terrific lives and seem prety happy.

And I know a number of them in contact with them in, I think for some of them that performed exceedingly well on standardize tests really on I hear a bit more and dismay in in their current life, not all but um is I have to imagine their data on his serve, early high performance being a seed for chAllenges later on. Obviously, you don't want the opposite. What I guess they refer to now as a complete failure to launch, you know, people not meeting that the milestones toward being um self sufficient adults. But what are some of the dangers of success when thinking about realizing one's larger potential?

Oh, that's such an interesting question. Um I think yeah I think they did on this go both ways. So you know summer early success is it's a motivator. IT builds the kind of momentum you were talking about earlier. There's a goal setting.

Researchers like lock and latham have talked about the high performance cycle where you hit a goal and then that builds your confidence and then you set a more ambitious school and then you reach IT. There's a support spiral over time, but there is also a mountain of evidence that achieving your goals can make you complacent. Ah and there's sometimes it's called the fat cat center center.

We're depressing on your laurel s and then they're also competency traps where you get good at something and then you keep doing IT the way you always done IT and you don't realize the world is change around you like am allergic to the idea of best practices the moment you call a practice best, if you've created an illusion that you're not. And the moment I think about precoe, like a lot of companies had really what they thought were affected models for collaboration. And all of a sudden their best practices are not feasible because everybody y's working remotely.

And we've got to throw that out the window and look for Better practices for an evolved world. So I think those the things I worry about most with early success, I think that one of things that I would love to see more people do when IT comes to reaching potential is, is to figure out what is my failure budget look like. So um I take my experience on this.

Yes, I started. I wrote a first book, gave IT to talk, and pretty soon felt like I was spending eighty percent of my time saying things already new and I was getting typecast. I'm not learning and growing, but i'm also not.

I don't feel like contributing new knowledge to the world. What am I going to do about that? And twenty eighteen roles around i'm like to know IT this.

I'm going to start a podcast and that will be my learning mechanism. And I did know if he was going to work. I didn't know how the medium would work for me.

I didn't know if people we're going to want to listen to my voice. I certainly don't. Maybe Morgan freeman man likes the sound of his own voice.

I like listening your .

podcast also enjoy this in the, but I think everybody hits the sound of their voice. I I just wasn't cheer for a lot of reasons whether I was going to work. And then I thought about IT, and I realized, well, all of the the pivotal moments in my career have come from taking a risk.

And I thought that I needed to build the confidence in order to do IT. And reflecting on goal setting, researchers, as one does, realized, you know, the confidence is going to come through doing IT. And so let me try IT and I guess what I took away was if I don't if I never fail IT means i'm not chAllenging myself.

I'm not embracing discomfort um i'm not being enough of an imperfections ist. So um I said actually set a goal that I would start at least one project every year that didn't succeed. And let's be clear, i'm not aiming for failure.

What i'm doing is, is creating an acceptable zona failure to know that that's onna motivate some rest taking and some experimental and hopefully some growth. And I know it's hard for a lot of people to do this in their lives, especially if you have A A super demanding boss. But I think we're all Better off from a growth and potential standpoint if we've got if you if you succeed on ninety percent year projects, that should be a hugely successful year. If you succeed on one hundred percent, I think you're aiming too low.

What are some of the projects that um you are currently spinning in the back of your mind? That would be fun. But if you're willing to share that for you still strike a little bit of of a anxiety CD. Like, oh no, like there are you you know are .

you a musician?

Do you see you again? Um are you thinking about becoming a musician? You're expLoring playing music and how the reason I ask you that way is um how far into your discomfort zone do you reach in order to um in order to chAllenge yourself because because I think that everyone needs to have threshold. There are a lot of things that ah I wish I could play a music al instrument, Frank, but i'm not that motivated to do IT most of because I enjoy hearing other people play music so much that i'm probably happy. I'm saying there's .

also enough good music out there.

You don't have to create. There's definitely a lot .

of great music here. So I think there's a micro version this so on the microsite um and then past year I I did this work like podcast for five years. I have taken the core of my organizational psychology work and trying to take on a topic and and make IT interesting and useful to people, and then realizing I was feeling constrained just to focus on work. And as a psychologist, there a of other things that we expand into second show rethinking. And I have some experiments i'm tempted to try, but i've been really hesitant to do them.

So did you watch um I did watch a little bit of IT. And then for whatever reason, in the last year my good friend rick rubin, who's his not obsessed but he is a real devote, is a fan of professional wrestling. He had me watched some W W E, but IT even A W he was explaining that is basically physical dramas, claiming why it's so intriguing him and so informative to him.

And then i'm a bigger fan of a certain genre of music and large rejects, and from ancient is a huge restless fans and now got multiple people that are coming the contact with. They were like telling me stuff about rustling. So restless seems to be cropping up more and more.

right? So I don't know the first thing about rustling.

I think I caught in a few times, kid, like there was IT the how cogan and a few others passed across.

Yeah yes. But the thing that I remember was loving the tag team matches where somebody would get over power and then they pull in somebody to help. I would be so interesting if there is a podcast where you take issues that people fundamentally disagree on and you started debate, and then somebody can tag in if they want to chAllenge an argument.

And so instead of concentrating on the particular guess you have, you basically have a problem you're trying to know to get to the roots of, and you're going to have all these people jump in and hope fully build ward a more insight ful perspective on IT. I no idea if this going to work. I'd really love to try IT and this is the first time i've spoken out loud about IT because I don't know that I that I want to see that crash and burn and yes, why not like what's the risk?

Think it's so cool? Yeah what one topics are are are you thinking about covering because I can think it's a pretty, pretty controversial topics, but I want to know what the ones you're thinking about.

Well, I mean, I literally just I mean, i'm thinking out oud here, but one one that I think on the controversial front that would could be really rich as to think about policies for trans athletes in sports.

That's a reverse controversial.

But also, i've talked to some experts on this. I've talked to some trans athletes and the people who are deepen this do not know what they think the policy should be. And so I think actually hearing them talk and you understanding the complexity of those issues and then know maybe hammering out what's a policy would would propose for schools, what would you want for now for olympic events? I just think that would be fascinating. And I love i'd loved to moderate that .

discussion with this.

Maybe I don't into that one. Glad you would.

I wouldn't. That seems so like one of the most barbed wired topics one could ever embarkment, which is exactly why i'm gna put in my vote. You absolutely should do this podcast.

I think it's an amazing idea. Actually folks put in the comments section on youtube or night. Adam should do this podcast in that topic in particular. I think you will be amazing because one thing that keep coming back to in my own mind is that a lot of the controversies out there stem from the fact that we very often have individuals pitted against individuals, and there's so much a lost in that.

And I think about science, and going back to the scientific method, where we have sub fields pitted against sub fields, when when you talk about a field, like there was huge controversy over the structure of DNA IT wasn't one individual against another. What you had, small groups, different camps, and there was some partial overlap. There is also, you know, if you read the double helix, there is also a lot of complicated favor people, people entering romantic relationships, just a clean information from the other side, you human beings not at not at their fine est, but in any event, small panels arguing competing teams competing, I think is um far more interesting and informative than individuals buttling heads.

I think so too, and I think no another another one that I think would be really interesting in I in like people always say great minds think like no great mind to chAllenge each other to think differently. And we just don't do enough at that. So i've been to a lot politically. What if we brought together a bunch of people um who are not idealogues but are really interested in pragmatic policy solutions to rewrite the constitution? If we were going to build .

one today and you'd like to tackle big stuff, I know I love you. I love IT.

It's a compliment. It's a compliment earlier.

no week saw, no week saw. So like you just you go right for that. I mean, listen, these are the issues that people are really activated by because these are really core issues that they get down to the autonomic nervous system in the hypothalamic. Don't think they should be like.

I look at these topics and think I just want to get IT right. I don't have a vested interest in what the model should be. I just know that even the wisest people of two hundred fifty years ago, we're not prepared to anticipate the world we live in today.

And we ought to be constantly I don't know. I don't think you should live in the world where you confirm your beliefs. I think the only way you learn is by continually evolving your beliefs.

And so I guess i'm trying to figure out more ways to catalist that around issues people care about. But I don't care about the issues. I care about the stretching of thinking and the improving the way that the world works.

Well, i'll tell you if you decided do this podcast with a tag team form, and I love that you cleaned IT from watching reston a couple of times around. These are very controversial issues. I promise you, that would be one of the most popular and important podcast on the planet earth.

Might be podcast on other planets. I hear that galaxy e's far, far away with they may have pocket two may have had of them for much longer than we have. But that's that's a winner. Well.

maybe maybe i'll try IT as a little experiment on the rethinking feed and see if it's an unmitigated disaster.

You know where my vote lies.

I appreciate that. So okay. So to go back your question for second, on the macro side, i've always thought I would be fun to try to write a simple file novel.

And the question i'm rustling with right now is, is that a good use of my time there? Great size I writers out there. There aren't that many social scientists communicating about the topics that I do. And I feels like IT might be, I don't know, that may be too much .

of a diversion. Then again, according to your words, you had no talent diving, but you exceeded all all performance metrics by considerable amount through motivation and um and opportunity right um I vote yes not I haven't read much size I maybe I need to read read more sipi I are you .

a fan of thi? I like it's one of my favorite to imagine a Better world and also prevent a worst one from emerging. But I don't know there there's a part of me that thinks there's there's Robert seen and colleagues did do you know this research on nobel prize winning sciences and what different ship them from their peers?

No, but being the son of a physicist, st. And having been surrounded by, just by circumstances, number of nobel prize winners, when I was a kid, Young kid, very curious to know what what this research says.

I think there there are many themes you keep clean from IT. The thing that really jumped out at me is the nobel prize winners are more likely have artistic .

coy fineman certainly did yeah um that me .

there's a long list of but if you break IT down in the data, IT was there twice as likely as their peers to play a musical instrument there seven times is likely to draw a pain there twelve times is likely to do poetry or fiction, creative writing, and get this twenty two times as likely as their peers. Twenty two to dance act or yes, performance magicians. Well, former magician is very excited about this.

Well, I wasn't going to ask about magic, but let's talk about IT. I was on vacation every year. I take my sister in new york for herbert day. My birthday, her birthday are close together.

And we went and saw a magician, mentalist, by the name of archie wind as E I think it's a great pronunciation um who just just like the last time my son absolutely blew my mind there is no way it's not magic. Of course I know it's not magic, but it's but minor change. Is that there some things that he and great mentalist and magicians do where they're not absolutely certain of the outcome they're playing? It's probably tic. And so there's a risk in a thrilled for them too um and that they're also creating memories in a racing memories and um and something that I may host oc on the podcast because he's very effective at creating memories and a racing memories. That's a lot of what he does and he has tactics to do that. In any event, I wasn't going to ask about magic, but I know that you were a professional condition at at one point in your life and that you did this personally because you enjoy doing IT um but getting beyond the sort of pull rabbit at the head or picked or identify the car that the person picked out the shuttle stack, what is IT and what was IT about magic that intrigues you? IT does IT inform anything about the worth that you do now?

IT does. Yeah, I I think when I started, I was twelve and I was I was just fun, and I was looking for a way to entertain other people and entertain myself in the process became a chAllenge. Can I earn this new scale? And can I have master this trick? I think nerdish thing I did in college was I started a magic club. David wong, who is A A Stellar magician and crucial verbalize, is he calls .

IT crucial verb.

He does magic crossword puzzles essentially that I can do adjust as you have to see IT. It's and I watch him for you know our first performance together and realized one of us is going to make IT as a magician and it's not me ah is outstanding anyway. Um the way of figures in my work now is, I think, so much of good science communication as misdirection, and it's the same scale I use as magician.

If I told you that the the card you picked was about to disappear from the deck and appear on the window, you would not be nearly as intrigued as if IT happened by surprise. And I think the same is true when we communicate knowledge. I think it's it's actually why so many of my posts you have this earlier, so many of my start with, you know, this thing is not what you think is actually the other thing um I think that you know chAllenging conventional wisdom, questioning assumptions is is what surprises people and then leaves them to think either I have something to learn or I don't know.

I get to put a shield because my belief are being chAllenge to attacked. And I think the art form of magic was always about creating a surprise that would delight people, as opposed to leading people to feel like they were tricked or duped or manipulated. And so I think the the chAllenge for me is to say, okay, I want to figure out what what do we know from behavioral science um yeah mostly focusing on psycho logy because that's my core expertise um what do we know that actually a different from most intuition and then how do I explain that anyway that surprises people but leads them to say, oh, that's so interesting as opposed to that's wrong and then want to fight .

about IT so much as if you give them the experience of what you're trying to teach them so that the oh that's wrong can uh be the available response be because in magic edo. Everyone knows its magic, just like with professional reselling folks, by the way, IT, there's there's some prior understanding of what's going to happen.

Maybe they go off script, but I think that's actually I think part of the interest in profession rustling for those that are extreme fans of profession rustling, is that they almost want to wonder about whether that some of IT is not in the plan, like is the suspension of the reality that they seem to enjoy, right? Because if you know something's fake or well, we should be I should be more careful about my language in with magic like going to want to see oc. I mean, I I don't think it's actual magic, but he's able to give the illusion of magic.

The real illusion is that it's magic, right? It's not the illusion of making the card hop to somewhere else in the room and his phenomenon, I highly recommend people go see his show if if they get the opportunity. But I think they are doing a documentary about him now.

Actually, they'll be some netflix stuff as well. But it's the illusion that magic exists that so exciting. So with science communication, yeah, I was aid for four things.

I don't always achieve them. But and I think you do as well. If I made that a topic, be interesting, clear, ideally actionable, but not always. And the the quite fact is when it's also surprising so interesting clear action and surprising the ultimately their up like oh, I didn't realize that but it's hard to find data points that satisfy all for catering .

and the surprising is the least important by far. Um I assume tables takes is is regress.

Oh well, okay sitting underneath all four of those points are that is that is actual science, right? Someone didn't just say IT right is not conjecture theory. So that means that there's data to support IT and that the data were collected with proper mental rigor, right? So there's there's a reservoir stuff that is underneath.

As a founder, given the baseline of rigor, how do I find what's interesting, clear, actionable and hopefully surprising? Although I okay, I would make a case. There was a classic article that murray Davis wrote one of my all time favorites.

He was a sociologist who wrote paper called that's interesting and he opened the paper by saying, um ideas live not because they are true, but because they're interesting which estimated one of my core beliefs I thought I was accuracy the drove people's beliefs and he said, no, ideas live because they're interesting and then he goes to build an index of the interesting to explain when people are intricate. And his case is that most of interest is surprised. And he breaks down all the ways that you can turn conventional wisdom upside down.

You can say that something you thought was bad was actually good, or vice first. So you can argue that something you thought was homogenize is actually had genius. You could argue that something you thought was individual was actually a collective phenomenon or vice over.

And he's got this wonderful breakdown of of all the ways of being interesting. And he's going to made the distinction between ideas that chAllenge weakly held assumptions, intriguing you, and strongly held assumptions, you know, sort of offending you. But I think from Davis view, and I think he's right, a huge amount of interesting surprise.

And so but I don't think it's the only driver of interest. So I I might take your criteria and say, okay, we start with rigor. We want to go to interest, clarity and actionability.

How do we get to interest? Let's build a sub model of the factors that drive interests and surprise might be might have the biggest beta way in the regression equation um but what else what else thrives? Interesting I ve have a couple hypothesis I want to hear yours um even doing this actively um and highly effectively beyond surprise. What else interest people .

in your content anything that draws on self reflection for them? I think we all have in a in a desire to Better understand ourselves why we work the way we do, why we don't work as well as we would like to in certain domaines, like some cast understanding on on our experiences of others to like, uh, now IT makes sense, like going back to the the county episodes, but we did several them. So I think it's appropriate, you know, to learn from him.

That narrow ism is envy. IT represents a extreme efficiency in the pleasure that people, nurses can have an extreme pleasure drive, but they, they always feel like they have far less than they would like to have, and that others have far more of IT because they don't have that same yearning for IT, right? And so that narcisse, at its core, is deep envy.

That to me was like, wow, you know and to realize that and to now understand that, and all the discussion to hear out there about nurses, everyone calling other people nurses, that there are genuine artistes out there, and what they really suffer from is an extreme deficit in pleasure, and they're constantly envious of others IT reframed everything I thought about narsisi about them being overbearing, which they can be and often are. Um it's so I think it's also anything that leads to um like oh I I I can navigate nurse is is Better with that. Well that I mean.

checks all your boxes is very surprising because it's not the way we Normally understand articles. M, but I think you you hit on for me, what's the maybe even is at least as important as surprise, maybe more so, is self relevance. And IT doesn't have to be actionable, right? IT has to, in a lot of cases, just help you understand or make sense of something that's been puzzle anger. That's that's um you know sort of I I think almost surprised when I say something from here's a synthesis of research. Here's a Better analysis and I think it's kind of obvious and people get excited about IT because he gave them language to describe something they've elt but they didn't know how to articulate talk about and I think .

that .

and I think this is why most of the most popular ted talks are about human behavior um because people are interested in people um and if you learn something about you or about others, you don't have to immediately do anything with that um to find IT intriguing and even useful because IT enriched your word .

view a recent guests on this podcast we haven't air IT yet, but maybe it'll be out by time this this areas was .

with a list of felman barat.

She's A C right? Says emotion in yeah, he described in how in certain cultures there is a language for sub categories of emotions, right? So you know, he described a word in japanese, I know we're call the word was that describes the the feeling of sadness that one has after getting a particularly bad haircut, something that I think you are, I are familiar with, but i'm familiar with from my experience of romantic barn's being, like really unhappy other hair like you like you're sad, but they're but by having a specific word for a specific experience, people feel less alone and the feeling passes more quickly in time.

And and then he gave some other examples from german and from, you know, in an languages and so forth. And I find this so interesting. It's like the moment people here that they are not alone in an experience. There's nothing actionable about IT, but IT IT creates a code shift thereafter in which they suffer less and make you feel more connected to others. I mean, I think it's really a beautiful example of of exactly what you're referring to do like when we learn about something and we we identify with that.

it's powerful. It's very powerful. And I think psychology often say named its tainted affect. Labelling is one of the most effective emotion regulation strategies. When we talked about distraction and reframing earlier, I should have said there's a third strategy, which is literally just to describe what you're feeling. IT seems to allow people than to reason with and process whatever they're feeling as opposed to allowing the feeling to control them.

And I I probably got the clear sense of this in in twenty and twenty one um I read a in your times article languishing the feeling of a blaw and I ve never had anything I any article I wrote resonate like this and I just the post the tag mate we're just like at me IT me at us and was like like one in two word reactions and I don't think IT was the content that matter to people IT was the just having the term um all the side of people realized this was originally corry keys as research that I was referencing IT had been a lapel for me to say there's if you think about the spectrum of well being, this is related to your mental illness versus mental health distinction. Those are two extremes that the continue and at one end we have depression in burnt out. Another end, we have.

And well being in flourishing language ing lives right in middle as courage describes IT as the absence of well being. So you're not depressed, you still have hope, you're not bonne d. You still have energy, but you're not a peak functioning.

You're missing a sense of purpose. You feel like you're stagnating and your empty. And you know there is something about just saying the word languishing that LED people to to realize, yeah, that's a thing. And of course, we're languishing. We're standing still in the middle of a global experiment that no one opted into which violates all rules of consent by science as I check.

Um but I think that that that's something that that probably is underreport ended when we're trying to communicate a scientist to say one of the most valuable things we do is we give people language to talk about things. And I think that's a massive part of of your impact is this is one of the big things i've learned from you. And I I used to be a little bit dismissive of of cognitive neo science in particular.

I thought understanding the brain has not taught me that much about the mind like being able to trace a simple example like when I read to do research being able to trace you know certain a major their responses um you know as the root of how people deal with fighter flight and threat. I don't know that that helped me that much if I could just describe fight flight, do I need the amiga a and you've committed me I was wrong about that because when people have when they understand the the neurological substrates of their thoughts, feelings and actions, they believe them more. They're like, oh, like there is a mechanism for this.

It's being produced inside my head. And even though I can't see IT, it's there and I can be studied with the tools of science. I think that's a really big deal. And I I really regret the fact that I didn't spend more time on condition neuroscience because I think i'd be a Better, a Better psychologist today.

Well, again, thanks for the kind words. I think that a fortunate evolution in our fields, or even field, if I may. Over the last ten years is that where neuroscience itself even needs to be subdivided into neuronal y and the neutral sio logy, it's lumped to all neuroscience. But IT now include psychology, computational neuroscience, cognitive roscius is all I think I consider us um we have different perspectives in different training, obviously but doing a lot of the same things um just using different different time section tools and different different language based tools.

And listen, what you've done I wanted to say masterfully I am just with like extreme virtuosity is to wrap your hands around such an enormous literature related to psychology and in the human mind and behavior and thought processes and emotions and potential and you so many topics and um and to extract the the most valuable gems from that literature and communicate them in away that anyone can understand and it's an extreme gift a to be able to do that and it's um and it's clear it's working because like you mention this article on languages which we will provide a reference or a link to in our captain because I want to go read that now I mean, i'm always struck by this feeling of, like, I am not tired, but you know, like i've got tones to do. But like, why do I just want us like sit here for only maybe I need to sit here, but then you get in in all like that, okay? But you know, I need there is a lot to do.

There's a lot to get up and go. I don't want to waste my life. And yeah, rest is good to I think languishing is something that like, I definitely can resonate with that. So when I had a bold dog at falt ladies here to view, because he was always languishing, but do you ever just languish, or you, or you busy enough that you just feel like you're always forward center mass? I think everybody languishes.

I think, is part of the human condition. And I think IT might even be evolutionary adaptive because I remember another sort of mind altering idea. Remember reading Randy neis argument that mild depression could be evolutionary functional, that you obviously clinical depression is debilitating in a lot of ways, but low grade sadness.

Um linens melon collie um we know one one of the things I can do is brought in in your field division. And for many people, sadness is a signal that something is not working. And IT can motivate a problem solving.

Um IT can, in some cases, open access to new perspectives. Unfortunately, those potential benefits of Sandy are often overridden by the motivational cost and also the fact that you now spend all this time regulating your sadness and wondering why you're sad, right? And so it's it's hard to harness.

But I I had a similar thought about languishing from this perspective to say that you maybe moments of languishing open us up to change when we get stuck. Sometimes we realized we have to move backward in order to make progress. Sometimes you have to unlearn things that you thought you knew in order to to keep growing.

And you know, I don't a friend man said he read my languishing pieces like not the english ing type. Okay, maybe everybody is baseline is different. Like I think one of the things I am really lucky to have is high reserves of energy.

But for me, languages is I felt like I did nothing today. And, you know, in a typical day, like, if i'm writing a book, I should be able to, like, write a thousand words i'm proud of, and only like a single word that I predict. Or I SAT at my blinking curse, like staring at the computer screen.

And for the empty time, wondered, like, did they call IT a cursor because of all the writers you've curtain? And then I end up like google the like, what the latter route to the word cursor? Where did this come from? And that is not a good use of time.

It's like that's not forward mass. That's like i'm spinning so, so good. Yeah, I think everybody languishes and I aspire to do IT less often, but not never love IT.

What does curse? What is the rooter curser people look at up, put a fox, put in, put IT in the comments on youtube.

I did. I did look at that.

Oh, good. Okay, you'll tell us now.

No, I feel like is a footnote in hidden potential. And i'm trying to remember IT comes from curra, I think. And the curse originally came. No, I don't want to do IT.

I amp is smart enough to discarded that information and you you have more important things to do. Forgiving me for asking the question folks put in the comments on youtube. So good I have one more question about potential.

Uh you have children correct um and a lot of our listeners, either our children or have children um and even for those that don't have children, i'm curious with the vast array of knowledge that you now have about potential and the fact that kids are these incredible sponge es right they I mean they they certainly experiences this comfort. We know that they are sponges. We absolutely know that sometimes their filters we try and teach them will be filters.

And hopefully they are imperfections ist. Maybe there are kids they're just perfection is by default. But to imagine that they are because standards come about when we become aware of other people's performance, right? What sorts of messages do you recommend parents give their kids, and what sorts of messages are you actually implementing that perhaps are different than you were prior to researching and writing your book on potential?

interesting. Well, the first thing I should say is Becky Kennedy, doctor Betty is my favorite ite source of insight parenting. And she's changed the way I think of the way I think about a lot of what I do with our kids.

But my wife, ellison, is SHE. Her instincts about effective parenting are so sophisticated. I feel like every day I learned something from watching her communicate with our kids. And so I came in thinking, are I write this book about potential? I'm not going to do a parenting chapter because I want everything to be relevant to parents.

And sure, now there's a chapter that had nothing to the parenting where oh actually um am reading this research and there was a moment where I did something well and I didn't even mean to do IT. Um and this is something that I think everyone probably under utilizes anyone actually that's an overstatement. I think a lot of people don't appreciate the importance of of this approach to parenting, and I am trying to do IT more often.

So quick, quick story back up into the principle. So I was was getting ready to get my first ted talk number years ago extremely nervous, a shy introvert. I was for a long time afraid of public speaking.

I remembering college literally shaking um to raise my hand are being that nervous and now I just to get in the red circle um not my idea of comfort down and having to mentioned to our oldest daughter that I was nervous and I asked her for advice on what I should do and he said I think I think at the time but he must have been SHE was seven, maybe six seven, maybe six anyway um SHE said, look for a smiling face in the audience. So IT IT was one of those moment. Like, h that's such a good idea.

Why do I think of that? Ah, yes, I can do that. I know people who are going to be in the audience.

So I asked a couple of friends to sit in the front. Rose and I locked eyes with a couple of them, and my nervous went down a little bit. So a couple weeks later, john is getting ready to be in a school play.

And she's also shy and introverted, and she's nervous and SHE ask us for advice. And instead of telling her what to do, I said, well, what did you suggest to me a few weeks ago? And SHE SHE remembered.

And he said, look for a smiling face. And IT IT was one of, like the IT was one of the most moving moments of my life, like as and I got to the play and SHE looked us and SHE beamed. And I just I think what i'd learned from that experience was a kids need to feel that they matter. And most of us think about mattering, as you know, showing kids that they're unconditionally loved and giving them the support they need. But we forget that part of feeling that you matters, feeling that you make a difference.

So as a kid, feeling like you have something to contribute, as a parent asking my daughter for a advice that boosted her confidence and I think that this is i've come to all this the coach effect is one of my favorite Bruce and findings in psychology that when you're struggling with something um your instinct is to go to somebody else for your advice and say I need guidance the problem is that keeps doing a passive frame of mind IT makes you feel like you're dependent on others. What you're Better off doing is finding somebody else with a similar chAllenge and giving them advice. And what that does is IT IT shows you that you have something to give um IT boost your efficient y um the research on this by learn a scrip wink learn colleagues is fascinating sob people who give advice instead of receiving IT randomly assigned, end up more motivated and more confident um and I think this is something every parent can do right.

Whatever chAllenge you think your kid is gonna face, find a version of the year grappling with and seek their guidance on IT. And when they run into that same chAllenge, they will have confidence that they can begin to figure out out on their own. And you can be a coach in that process is supposed to just telling them what to do, which they may feel like is not relevant, or they may resist because they don't want to be told what to do by a parent. So that is my favorite parenting lesson from hidden potential.

Love that and I love your statement that you know kids like adults want to matter being, we hear, make them feel important. But so often that's tight to performance metrics. And those performance matrix are the very things that are making them nervous or that are creating anxiety. Um I love IT. Are you taking additional kids for adoption, for race raising and raising my hand?

I think they're be a lot more developed dal psychologists in the world if if we chose our careers later.

Super interesting topic. By the way, i'm very much looking forward to reading your book a hidden potential. Clearly I have a lot to resolve around that issue because um I still hear this wolf and in middle school just telling me how much potential we have and that and I wasn't an accessing mine oh I like a voice in the back of my head um all the time.

And even though I feel very happy with um um many aspects of my life that there are a lot of things. I want to do that I haven't done and I think it's through, you know, limit limited. What have they got limiting self beliefs, things that self living beliefs. There you go. I can anyone say say the phrase .

I do think of your fans like, yeah that Andrew huberman really isn't he hasn't really taps his potential at all.

It's onder ing IT well in mind. I've i've lived in a fairly narrows trend, ch of pursuit. You know, at nineteen I got into this, and i've been doing this like researching and teaching and doing this like premature i've done for like almost heading to thirty year.

So and you two, you've been in this in this game for a long time and it's it's where we like to play. But but what i've learned from you today, in addition to many other things, is that realizing our potential has so much to do with you reaching outside that we hear about our comfort zone. But it's also reaching into are like deeper wishes and thoughts. And uh, I I keep going back to this idea of the tag in podcast and the origins of that in your mind is like I would never would have expected that. But they also revealed something that sounds kind of intrinsic to you like you maybe you like to see things play out the way you think they should be played out as opposed to that what's clearly intractable battle of loggerheads.

Yes, that that's a core value, mike, I think I can imagine an unsolved problem.

I love that. And I want you, I want your brain with an adam. I want to thank you, first of all, for taking the time to data. Come talk to us, certainly not just about your book, but we covered in an enormous range of topics.

So you talk us about procrastination, which is sort of the third rail of life for so many people, creativity and trying sic extract c motivation and blind spots, authenticity and so much more. But also, I want to thank you for being such a active teacher on social media in the classroom. You still run a research program.

You're doing ted talks, you're writing multiple books. You you're absolutely phenomenal terms of the the amount of information that you're putting out into the world. And I must say I always, always, always learn from your post, your podcast, your books like there are certain people in the world, they're exceedingly rare, but you're one of them when they open their north, people learn and they learned valuable knowledge.

And it's it's an incredible thing to be on the receiving end. And so I just want to say, on behalf of myself and everyone else, thank you ever so much for what you do. And please keep going well.

thank you. That means a lot to me to considering the source because I have the sentiments are mutual. I think every time time I whether it's reading one in your post or seeing one of your reals, my overall, we thought is that is a master teacher. And if I had been luck enough to take one of your classes, I might have gone more of the neuroscience .

direction well and .

then fails would have been interesting to learn more about IT minimum. And I just have tremendous admiration for your commitment to making science interesting, clear and useful to people.

Thank you. I consider us some on the same team in in that regard, and I probably will tell you about a potential collaboration with so much fun to to work together. Meanwhile, again, thank you for everything you're doing. And like I said, just keep going and please come back again. I feel like there are a thousand topics we can talk about and that we should honor.

I'll try to make you regret that.

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