Welcome to the huberman Lab podcast where we discuss science and science based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and Ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is dr. Adam Grant Adam Grant is a professor of organizational psychology at the Wharton School at University of Pennsylvania. He has authored five best-selling books and most recently has authored a new book entitled hidden potential. He received his bachelor's degree.
Harvard University and his Doctorate from the University of Michigan today. We discuss peer-reviewed studies and tools based on the data from those studies that can enable people to meet their goals and overcome significant challenges including how to overcome procrastination as well as how to see around or through blind spots as well as how to overcome sticking points in motivation and creativity. We also discuss the research on and practical tools related to the underpinnings of performance in any Endeavor in
including how to increase ones 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 breadth of knowledge and that knowledge is both practical. It is based on peer reviewed research and he conveys those tools with the utmost Clarity and generosity indeed by the end of today's episode. You will have more than a dozen do tools never discussed before on the huberman Lab podcast that you can apply.
In your academic Endeavors in athletic Endeavors and creative Endeavors. In fact in any area of life before we begin I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is however part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to Consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public in keeping with that theme. I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is eight sleep aids,sleep make smart mattress covers with cooling Heating and sleep tracking capacity.
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Good to have you here your career, both public-facing and academic career of covered an enormous range of topics. So we have a lot to cover liquor talking and anytime to Professor sit down or even one professor says we have a lot to cover. I think everyone listening braces themselves like oh no but these topics I assure everyone are of the utmost 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 procrastinator but a different way of stating that is that I love deadlines. I learned in college that I love love love deadlines because it seems to harness my focus in my attention like just enough. I guess you call it anxiety or autonomic arousal for the you know Neuroscience or physiology oriented folks for me just brings about
A total elimination of all of the distractors and it seems to both slow and accelerate my perception of time and it seems to bring out my best to have deadlines but I would prefer to not have to procrastinate in order to self-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 other people procrastinate is?
It that they're seeking deadlines as I believe I am and interestingly and sort of alluding to this recent paper of yours. What is the relationship between procrastination and creativity? I feel like we should just deal with all that later. Let's put it off good one, by the way, there's extra credit for science horns on here. So but nicely done one of the best articles on procrastination ever written was titled at last my
Article on procrastination fantastic. I love it. Yeah, it just made me smile. So I think that the basic question I think to start with is why do we procrastinate and I thought I was immune actually when I came into this topic. I was the the person who annoyed my college roommates by finishing my thesis a couple months early. I found out there was a term for me. I'm a procrastinator. So the, you know the focus and the pressure that you get from a deadline I get that the moment the project starts.
And sometimes months or years in advance. And so I was really proud of finishing everything early and then I discovered there are things that I procrastinate on to which was a little bit disappointing. Are you willing to share what some of those? Yeah, so I procrastinate on anything that's administrative. So I'm right there with you when I get time on my calendar. It could take me weeks to respond. You asked me a question about social science. I will be back to you in a minute. I procrastinate on grading.
Takes me forever. I basically put off a whole bunch of tests that I thought had nothing in common. It turns out that I procrastinate when I'm bored like boredom is I guess it's probably my most hated emotion. And so I will do anything to avoid a boring task and I think this goes to why people procrastinate which is a lot of people think it's laziness or you're not disciplined enough, but actually the research on this is really clear that you're not avoiding work when you procrastinate in fact a lot of our procrastination
His focus on doing things that involve a lot of energy you've seen people probably clean their entire houses when they're putting off a task. So it's not that you're being lazy. It's that you're avoiding negative emotions that a star's up. So for me it's boredom for a lot of people. It's fear or anxiety. I don't know if I can pull this off. I have an extreme case of impostor syndrome in this role. The the challenge in front of me is too daunting for some people it's confusion. I haven't figured it out yet. And so I can't work on this because I
II feel like I'm stuck. So what's I guess the big question for you than answer is what's the emotion that causes you to procrastinate, you know, it's hard for me to identify the stick here. I think of it more as the carrot that comes with deadlines. And again, I don't consider myself a procrastinator per se. I just really love deadlines and procrastination is a terrific way to simulate the deadline. So for me, oh 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 arousal me to know. Okay. I've got 72 hours to complete something and it's now game time. I like the game time before the game time before a podcast. I'll put in anywhere from you know, several days to weeks or even months in preparation. So it's really elastic depending on the topic, but when it came to exams in school or if it comes to writing deadlines,
If 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 groove of doing focused work because for me that's such a drug. I mean, it feels like all having all the systems of my brain and body oriented towards one specific thing is just sheer Bliss for me. So it sounds like that in your
Actually, not a chronic procrastinator. Thank you. And I've never that's never been the way I viewed myself. But now I'll take that it's a strategy for you. It is a strategy. That's right. And I didn't you know, I was fairly Wayward youth barely finished high school Etc. So by time I got serious about school which was my second year of University when deadlines were presented like there's an exam. There's a midterm exam on a given date that was exciting to me that was exciting was like, okay. That's the big thing. That's my
Opportunity to prove myself to myself because I was really coming from behind and then the opportunity to or I should say that the feeling of dropping into that Groove like this is the exciting part is the preparation likewise with podcasting for our solo podcast. I love the research as much as I love presenting the material may be maybe more maybe more right likewise for University lectures or for traveling and giving seminars as a traditional academic. I'm sure you're familiar with that right? It's nice and preparation.
Where you realize it's almost like I think of it as somebody like a like a minor in a mine and just finding a gem and of course, there are then they're all the thoughts of what you can do with that later and you're going to show people it has a certain value to the world Etc. But but it's the the searching and finding those gems that is like even as I talk about I feel like my body's going to float out of the chair a little bit. I've the same experience. It's that it's the sort of the Unleashed curiosity and then the rush of Discovery and by the time you're teaching it or explaining it.
It but I already know this like I'm not learning anything anymore. And yes, I'm excited to share it and I hope it's helpful to other people. So, you know, I think as you talk about what your process looks like, I don't even think what you do qualifies as procrastination Technically. She's getting better and better. It's yours. If you think about it how procrastination is defined. It's it's delaying despite an expected cost.
And you don't think there's a cost you actually see a benefit. That's right. And I've tried started things Across the Nation. That's just the way you have tried starting the is 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 write this book chapter or you know, finally sitting down to research some papers for an episode, but I'm thinking about it all the time. Yeah, maybe much to the dismay of people.
My life, you know, I'm I'm constantly thinking about these things. I mean walking to take out the recycle. I'll have ideas and then I'll write them down. I constantly am writing things down voice memos into my phone. I have a method of capture where I basically try and just grab everything and then filter out. What's useful. Do you have a process like that for for gleaning ideas a little bit I do now. So when when G Haitian and I started this research on procrastination she had she had come to me. She's very creative doctoral student and she said,
I have my best ideas when I'm procrastinating.
And it was it was one of those moments where I didn't believe her but I thought it was an interesting enough idea that it was worth exploring and I said show me get let's get some data. Let's see if we can we can test this and she ended up Gathering data in a Korean company where she surveyed people on how often they procrastinate and then got their supervisors to rate their creativity and sure enough found that people who procrastinate sometimes were rated as more creative than people who rarely do like me the procrastinators.
And I remember asking her what about the chronic procrastinators? And she's like, I don't know they never filled out my survey. Yeah, is that recall from that paper? There's an inverted U shape function with procrastination on the vertical axis and and and creativity on the horizontal axis event flipped. Sorry. Okay. So explain to me then the relationship between procrastination and creativity Yeah. So basically the peak of creativity is in the middle of procrastination. Okay. Got it.
And yeah, there's a there's an upside down U curve there. And so then I thought this was fascinating. So then we go into the lab to say can we replicate this? Can we control it in an experiment? And the hardest part of that was how do you randomly assign people to procrastinate to my knowledge never been done before and we eventually figured out that we could give people a bunch of tasks to do and then tempt them with highly entertaining YouTube videos that were placed on their screen and we put different numbers of YouTube videos there so that you know, there's only
And you're not tempted to procrastinate much if there are four you're probably going to get sucked into a little bit of a YouTube spiral if they're eight. You might be putting off the task. That's much less exciting than then, you know watching Jimmy Kimmel's Mean Tweets for example, and this was done in a fairly naturalistic environment for this particular people are on a computer. They're asked to you know to solve some created 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
Who were attempted to procrastinate moderately ended up generating the most creative ideas? So why is that there are a couple things that happen and you have to look at both sides of the curve. So what's wrong with the procrastinators? And also what happens to the the extreme procrastinators and in both cases? What happens is you end up with a little bit of tunnel vision. So when I dive right into a task, I'm stuck with my first ideas and I don't wait long enough to incubate and get my best ideas. I'm less likely to reframe the problem.
Less likely to access remote knowledge because I'm just I'm just diving right in and meanwhile The Chronic procrastinators end up in the same boat because they don't get started until the last minute and so they have to rush ahead with the easiest idea to implement as opposed to really developing the most novel idea and meanwhile the people in the middle who you know starting to feel that pressure of wow, you know, I respond by wheels for 10 minutes watching a bunch of YouTube videos. I'm running out of time for this task. They still have enough time to work on the ideas that were active in the back of there.
Mine's and that gives them a shot at more novel ideas. So I've tried to adopt this to answer question. I've tried to adopt this as my process now to say I will still dive into a project ahead of schedule, but I will not commit to an idea until I've let it incubate for a few weeks and I'm working on other things where as an earlier version of me like when I 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.
But it's far more creative. What are your thoughts about some of what you described being in an unconscious way of seeding the mind and the unconscious with an idea. So for instance, let's take a School academic scenario where students get an assignment and the assignment is contained within a folder and it just says assignment, okay, and it's do in a particular date and it says do on that particular date and they're given the folder but they have no sense of what the assignment is.
It is you can imagine one category of procrastinator that will take that thing and put it down and avoid looking at it entirely versus another category of procrastinator that will Flip Flip it open and take a look at okay. This is going to be an essay on you know, I don't know something about an economic theory in the late 1700s close it and then procrastinate there is an idea which I frankly I subscribe to a little bit because we recently did this series on Mental Health not
Walnuts, but mental health with dr. Paul Conti where he talked extensively about the unconscious and how the unconscious mind is always working with ideas things that we are concerned about performance these sorts of things even if we're not aware of them. What what are your thoughts about the creativity that seeded by slight procrastination being related to actually knowing what you're procrastinating on specifically. I think it turns out to be I don't want to say essential but critical so one of the things we found is
Is in order for moderate procrastination to fuel creativity, you have to be intrinsically motivated by the thing you're procrastinating on interesting. And so 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 gonna do any subconscious processing. You're not going to have any unexpected connections between this topic and something else you've learned learned about or been curious about if you're interested in the problem then
When you put it off, you're much more likely to still keep it active in the back of your mind. And that's when you begin to to see you know, I imagine you could explain the biology of this. I imagine for example, there's there's probably there's probably more neural networks that are connecting. You probably get you get access to ideas that previously would have been sort of separate nodes. And so I think that you want to
Know what the topic is, right? You don't want to just see the blank assignment. But you also have to find a reason that this is exciting to you. Otherwise, you're going to avoid it as opposed to letting it percolate that brings us to the topic of intrinsic motivation and I'd like to link that up with the topic of performance. So when I was in university, there were many topics that I was excited to learn about some more than others, of course, but occasionally I'd be in a class or I'd get an assignment that frankly I had minimal.
Interested never zero but minimal interest and as a way of dealing with that I embarked on a process of literally lying to myself and just telling myself. Okay. I'm super interested in reading this and I'm going to force myself to be interested in reading it and lo and behold I would start falling in love with certain things. Maybe he was it was even the, you know, the arrival of a word that I didn't recognize and then I would go look it up and I knew I was studying for the GRE at that time. So I had filed that away. I still have my notebooks of all the vocabulary.
Larry words that I learned in the course of my university courses that frankly made the verbal portion of the GRE pretty easy, you know, which if you ever try and study for that the end it's pretty tough to commit all those new words to let to memory and context so I could find little hooks and and through those hooks I could kind of Ratchet my way into a larger interest and then lo and behold I'm really interested in Greek mythology, you know that actually like that one at first, but I didn't have to trick myself but
No, maybe we could spend a little bit of time talking about what is true intrinsic motivation. Is it always reflexive can we make ourselves intrinsically motivated about us given topic or scenario or group of people and then let's talk about how intrinsic motivation links to Performance because there's a rich literature on this as I recall and I remember, you know, the Stanford study of rewarding kids for things. They were already not very motivated to do it we could touch on that a little bit and remind people who haven't heard about it.
But I'm fascinated by this topic because I feel like so much of life is about doing things that initially we don't feel that excited to do. Yeah and yet succeeding in life, you know until you can afford to offload your administrative work to somebody else which hopefully but you know by now you have to get it done, right? This is fundamental to being a functional human being frankly not just successful in air quotes but functional we got to do stuff that we don't enjoy doing. Yeah, so I think
We can talk about a couple different ways to nurture intrinsic motivation we can think about how the task itself is designed we could think about reward systems and then we can think about also the things we say to ourselves and others which I hope her not lies, but rather persuasive attempts, let's start on that one. Actually. I don't know a lot of people who are that good at deliberate self-deception. Well, I like to think it was only around a particular set of goal motivated Pursuits, but at that time for me also,
Is survival as I mentioned I didn't do well in high school. I really want to perform well in University, but I knew that working just for the grade wasn't going to carry me. It was it felt catabolic and I don't know maybe I at that age I was still in the window of heightened neuroplasticity. 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 Elliot Aronson, 's classic research on cognitive dissonance where he would he would ask you to go and tell somebody else a task you hated is really interesting. And if he paid you a lot to do it, you still hated the task because you had a justification like I got 20 bucks to you know to kind of FIB a little bit about this task, you know, the task is bad, but I did it for the for the payment when he paid you one dollar to go and tell somebody that
You loved a task that you didn't you ended up liking it more. Wow, and maybe I shouldn't be surprised but maybe you should tell me why I shouldn't be surprised because I hope people got what you just said very clearly and if they didn't if you don't like doing something going and reporting to somebody else how great that thing is. So lying about it to somebody else is one way to increase the degree to which you like or enjoy that behavior or topic and if you're paid twenty dollars,
To go lie to somebody in the positive direction. So against your true belief. It's less effective in shifting your underlying effect about that thing your emotions then if you're paid less, correct, exactly. Now, I think obviously in the experiment lying was an easy way to show the effect but in real life, I think the way that you want to apply this is to say, all right. I've got to find something about this task that's interesting to me and then in the process of explaining it to somebody else. I'm going to convince myself because I'm
The argument from somebody I already like and trust that also chosen chosen the reasons that I find compelling as opposed to hearing somebody else's reasons. And so I think there's this goes to the point that you were making which is if you're trying to find a hook to make a topic intriguing you've got to figure out. Okay. What is it that would make this fascinating to me and in a lot of cases what you're looking for is a curiosity Gap. I think social scientists like to talk about curiosity as an itch.
That you have to scratch. So there's something you want to know and you don't know it yet. So I would say I tell my students often like take your least favorite class and find a mystery or a puzzle like something that you just do not know the answer to like I actually have talked with our kids about this like what what really happened to King Tut do you know, can you get to the bottom of that and all of a sudden? I wonder I need to Google it and then I need to see if Wikipedia has credible information on this and the more you learn about that the more
And it becomes and I think that's that's the beginning of the process of finding intrinsic motivation. I see so
inherent in your answer is the idea that there's something wired into our neural circuits and therefore psychology that Curiosity as a verb.
The act of being curious and seeking information where well and I should say I Define curiosity and I hopefully you'll disagree with me or agree. Either way. It doesn't matter as long as we can get a bit deeper understanding I Define curiosity as a desire to find something out where you are not attached to a particular outcome. Yes. Is that right? Yeah, I in Psychology is typically defined as just wanting to know and that means you're driven by the question not a particular answer which is exactly what you're driving at. Okay, great. So and I think it was Dorothy Parker that
It the cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity as there shouldn't be a care for curiosity. So and by the way folks, we don't know what neural circuits subserved curiosity in the brain is about it's got to be a distributed Network. There's no brain area for curiosity, but it's got to be linked up with the reward systems of dopamine etcetera in some way because when one discovers something new that satisfies some curiosity, that's clearly there's a there's an internal reward.
R okay, let me back up. So if your child or an adult is
Dreading working exploring a topic or going about an assignment of any kind. You will give them a question that they then need to resolve. What if the assignment is like rake the leaves off the front lawn. Do you do you say, you know count the leaves or I mean, how does one get past the sort of procrastination and generate some intrinsic motivation for things that one dreads where it's unlikely that they're going to discover.
Some knowledge. That's exceedingly useful for the future. You always start with. Okay. What's the first experiment? I can run find the most interesting looking leaf for your favourite leaf, and then that that lasts for about two minutes and like okay now it's a lot of leaves there. Right? I think not all tasks can be made intrinsically motivating to everyone and so when when intrinsic motivation is difficult to find what you want to substitute with is is a sense of purpose maybe a better way to say that is when the process is not interesting to you. You need to find a meaningful outcome. So
There's there's some research on the boring but important effect where kids who have a purpose for learning this goes through high school and think you know, this is not just interesting to me, but I'm going to be able to use this knowledge to to help other people one day they are more persistent and they're studying they end up getting better grades. And so I think in terms of 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'd say with the you know, the raking leaves. Let's try to connect that task to something that looks that you care about are you going to be pleasantly surprised your parents when they get home. Are you going to you know have a place to play soccer that you didn't before and I think then the, you know, the process of getting to that I guess I would say is if you're trying to motivate yourself. It's a little bit harder than if you're trying to motivate somebody else on this if I was going to motivate somebody else.
Take a page out of the motivational interviewing Playbook where I would say Okay, Andrew actually this place that for a second. So you're going to make a pile of leaves. It's a two-hour task 0 to 10. How excited are you about that? 33 really? I'm surprised. I thought you were gonna say 0 or 1. Hmm. Why is it not lower? I like any sort of physical activity because it allows me to move and I just like moving my body. There we go. Okay, so you just identified a potential source of purpose for that activity.
And I don't have a I don't have a vested interest in convincing you to do this task. I am genuinely curious about what would motivate you to want to do it. And as you start to articulate it boom self-persuasion kicks in love it. I'm going to start using these these approaches right at your own risk as we all know quality nutrition influences, of course our physical health, but also our mental health and our cognitive functioning our memory our ability to learn new things and to focus and we know that one of the most important
Features of high quality nutrition is making sure that we get enough vitamins and minerals from high-quality unprocessed or minimally processed sources as well as enough probiotics and prebiotics and fiber to support basically all the cellular functions in our body including the gut microbiome. Now, I like most everybody try to get optimal nutrition from Whole Foods. Ideally mostly from minimally processed or non-processed Foods. However, one of the challenges that I and so many other people face is getting enough servings of highwomen.
High quality fruits and vegetables per day as well as fiber and probiotics that often accompany those fruits and vegetables. That's why way back in 2012 long before I ever had a podcast. I started drinking a G1 and so I'm delighted the ag-1 is sponsoring the huberman Lab podcast. The reason I started taking a G1 and the reason I still drink ag1. Once or twice a day is that it provides all of my foundational nutritional needs that is it provides insurance that I get the proper amounts of those vitamins minerals probiotics and fiber to another
Sure, optimal mental health physical health and performance. If you'd like to try a G1 you can go to drink AG one.com huberman to claim a special offer. They're giving away 5 free travel packs plus a year supply of vitamin D3 K to again. That's drink AG one.com huberman to claim that special offer. I have a question about extrinsic motivation. So if
we grow up being incentivized by extrinsic things, you know, you'll get your allowance. If you blank you can spend the money that you make and you know on your paper route doing the things you really want to do.
Is there any value in those kinds of learning based incentives for kids and for adults because I mean that's the real world as well. I know plenty of people have family members that only work for a paycheck and they're pretty okay because they like spending their paycheck probably more that I you know, I'm not intrinsically attached to money. I mean I certainly have needs 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
Don't judge are they somehow existing in a in a diminished landscape of happiness 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 extrinsic rewards. There's a so, there's a huge body of evidence on what are the effects of end extrinsic rewards on motivation and performance and I think the latest conclusions if you look at the the latest meta-analyses, so
A huge study of study is trying to accumulate what's the average effect of adding a financial incentive to a task that wasn't incentivized before or to a job where you were paid salary and now we're going to give you incentive compensation. There is a boost so in general people are more productive when they're incentivized for their output, but these incentives are better for for motivating quantity than quality. So you see people get more done, but they're not necessarily more careful or more.
Errol they less careful unless there are 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 incentivizes, you know being fast and careful, but I think we're where we do have to be really cautious is there's an undermining effect of extrinsic rewards on intrinsic motivation and you were you were alluding to this earlier dating back to the early 70s where we know that if we take an interesting task and then we pay you for it. You might conclude that you're only doing it for the
Come and you lose interest in the test. So the classic demonstration Mark Clapper and colleagues is kids playing video games and they're they're playing them because they're fun and then you start to add in an incentive and then when the incentives taken away, they don't want to play anymore because the meaning of the task has changed and now I'm doing it because I want to get something out of it as opposed to I love the process. I think that that that phenomenon does not have to exist so we know for example at work if managers
Yes, as long as they give people autonomy, they don't present the rewards in a controlling way. So instead of saying, you know Andrew in order to earn this you need to do the following work if they say hey look, you know, I'd really love it. If you you know, if you would deliver the following in order to make that worth your while I'm offering this incentive people react very differently when they have a sense of choice and control. So I think that that's I guess the starting point in the presence of autonomy. I don't think there's
Your downside of extrinsic rewards. I think you also have to be careful that yeah, I guess that you're not over justifying the task. In other words, you're not you're not swapping people's intrinsic reason for doing it. But you're adding a reason to try it. So actually if we if we go to a different domain for a second so you look at kids who don't want to eat their vegetables extrinsic incentives are very effective to get kids to try vegetables for the first time, but then the hope is that
That they discover a vegetable or two that they don't mind and then they find reasons to keep doing it. And I think that that's how I want a lot of rewards to work. I don't think that rewards should be carrots that we dangle to try to control people's behavior. I think they should be symbols of how much we appreciate in value a particular behavior. And if you frame them that way it's a lot easier for people to say. Yeah, you know what I'm that that reward is something that I really want, but I'm not only doing the task for
Reward yeah that that you basically answered the question. I was going to ask which is and your risk of sounding new agey. But we are sitting in California I could imagine that when one is focused on the lsats tranzec rewards so of physical tasks or cognitive tasks for an extrinsic reward, if I'm focusing on the extrinsic reward. I'm also air quotes again not present right? I'm thinking about the outcome. I'm not thinking about process and
And I think there's you perhaps you can flush out some of what this is exactly. But I think there's a fairly extensive data to support the idea that when we are physically and mentally present to the tasks that we're going to perform better and presumably are intrinsic liking of that task or performing that task increases as well. Is that true? Yeah, I think so, I think so if we want to break down the mechanisms for why intrinsic motivation is useful for for performance one you touched on earlier its focus of attention your it's much easier.
Find flow when you're intrinsically motivated you get into that state of deep absorption where time melts away. So you mentioned, you know, sort of either speeding up or slowing down your sense of time. You forget where you are. Sometimes you even lose track of your identity and you're just you're just merged into the task. And so that that that concentration is helpful. There's also a greater persistence effect that when you enjoy what you're doing you're less likely to give up in the face of obstacles. You're more likely to think about it when you're not doing the task and come up with great ideas and
So, you know, I think there's there's a working harder. There's a working longer. There's a working smarter and there's also a thinking more clearly affect. This is a brief but related tangent one of the things that I found incredibly difficult in recent years is that you know, most of my life really since I was a small kid I was forging for things and then, you know, I used to give lectures on Monday in class if they let me until they eventually stopped me about the stuff. I was reading about all weekend so down early
Rotten egg and the professor aerial front but now if I'm reading something and I discover what I think is a really valuable piece of information or a tool or a protocol like wow, this is really cool. These findings are oh so cool. There's a problem, which is that now I have an opportunity to cast that out to the world through social media.
We all do this could be but I'm sorry you're on social media from time to time. I do much you're all over my feet you and I both do our own social media, by the way, which I really appreciate. I think he won can always detect if someone else has handling someone 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 comment section and always encourage comments I learned from it. Frankly. Love is a strong word I learned
From it, you know and you and I were weaned in the academic culture where frankly the kind of hazing that you one receives. An academic culture is very different than the kind of hazing the one receives on social media. But let's just say that if you come up through Academia, you develop a pretty thick skin. I do have to say though that there was a part of me that was really surprised. When I started posting on social that I love. I love constructive criticism. I was unprepared for the number of people who will need York criticize a study without even looking at whether the methods are rigorous.
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And now for my discussion with dr. Adam Grant Adam, welcome excited to be here very excited to have you here your career both public facing and academic career of covered an enormous range of topics. So we have a lot to cover liquor talking and anytime to Professor sit down or even one professor says we have a lot to cover I think everyone listening braces themselves like, oh no but these topics I assure everyone are of the utmost interest.
You cover them in such both fabulous detail and you make it very clear. So I'm really looking forward to this. I'd like to start off by talking about something that I'm obsessed by and I know a lot of people are obsessed with and struggle with and I know you also have a recent publication on this topic, which is procrastination.
I am a bit of a procrastinator but a different way of stating that is that I love deadlines. I learned in college that I love love love deadlines because it seems to harness my focus in my attention like just enough. I guess you call it anxiety or autonomic arousal for the you know Neuroscience or physiology oriented folks for me just brings about
A total elimination of all of the distractors and it seems to both slow and accelerate my perception of time and it seems to bring out my best to have deadlines but I would prefer to not have to procrastinate in order to self-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 other people procrastinate is?
It that they're seeking deadlines as I believe I am and interestingly and sort of alluding to this recent paper of yours. What is the relationship between procrastination and creativity? I
feel like we should just deal with all that later. Let's put it off good one,
by the way, there's extra credit for science horns on here. So
but nicely done one of the best articles on procrastination ever written was titled at last my
Article on procrastination fantastic. I love it. Yeah, it just made me smile. So I think that the basic question I think to start with is why do we procrastinate and I thought I was immune actually when I came into this topic. I was the the person who annoyed my college roommates by finishing my thesis a couple months early. I found out there was a term for me. I'm a procrastinator. So the, you know the focus and the pressure that you get from a deadline I get that the moment the project starts.
And sometimes months or years in advance. And so I was really proud of finishing everything early and then I discovered there are things that I procrastinate on to which was a little bit
disappointing. Are you willing to share what some of
those? Yeah, so I procrastinate on anything that's administrative. So I'm right there with you when I get time on my calendar. It could take me weeks to respond. You asked me a question about social science. I will be back to you in a minute. I procrastinate on grading.
Takes me forever. I basically put off a whole bunch of tests that I thought had nothing in common. It turns out that I procrastinate when I'm bored like boredom is I guess it's probably my most hated emotion. And so I will do anything to avoid a boring task and I think this goes to why people procrastinate which is a lot of people think it's laziness or you're not disciplined enough, but actually the research on this is really clear that you're not avoiding work when you procrastinate in fact a lot of our procrastination
His focus on doing things that involve a lot of energy you've seen people probably clean their entire houses when they're putting off a task. So it's not that you're being lazy. It's that you're avoiding negative emotions that a star's up. So for me it's boredom for a lot of people. It's fear or anxiety. I don't know if I can pull this off. I have an extreme case of impostor syndrome in this role. The the challenge in front of me is too daunting for some people it's confusion. I haven't figured it out yet. And so I can't work on this because I
II feel like I'm stuck. So what's I guess the big question for you than answer is what's the emotion that causes you to procrastinate,
you know, it's hard for me to identify the stick here. I think of it more as the carrot that comes with deadlines. And again, I don't consider myself a procrastinator per se. I just really love deadlines and procrastination is a terrific way to simulate the deadline. So for
me, oh 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 arousal me to know. Okay. I've got 72 hours to complete something and it's now game time. I like the game time before the game time before a podcast. I'll put in anywhere from you know, several days to weeks or even months in preparation. So it's really elastic depending on the topic, but when it came to exams in school or if it comes to writing deadlines,
If 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 groove of doing focused work because for me that's such a drug. I mean, it feels like all having all the systems of my brain and body oriented towards one specific thing is just sheer Bliss for me.
So it sounds like that in your
Actually, not a chronic procrastinator.
Thank you. And I've never that's never been the way I viewed myself. But now I'll
take that it's a strategy for
you. It is a strategy. That's right. And I didn't you know, I was fairly Wayward youth barely finished high school Etc. So by time I got serious about school which was my second year of University when deadlines were presented like there's an exam. There's a midterm exam on a given date that was exciting to me that was exciting was like, okay. That's the big thing. That's my
Opportunity to prove myself to myself because I was really coming from behind and then the opportunity to or I should say that the feeling of dropping into that Groove like this is the exciting part is the preparation likewise with podcasting for our solo podcast. I love the research as much as I love presenting the material may be maybe more maybe more right likewise for University lectures or for traveling and giving seminars as a traditional academic. I'm sure you're familiar with that right? It's nice and preparation.
Where you realize it's almost like I think of it as somebody like a like a minor in a mine and just finding a gem and of course, there are then they're all the thoughts of what you can do with that later and you're going to show people it has a certain value to the world Etc. But but it's the the searching and finding those gems that is like even as I talk about I feel like my body's going to float out of the chair a little
bit. I've the same experience. It's that it's the sort of the Unleashed curiosity and then the rush of Discovery and by the time you're teaching it or explaining it.
It but I already know this like I'm not learning anything anymore. And yes, I'm excited to share it and I hope it's helpful to other people. So, you know, I think as you talk about what your process looks like, I don't even think what you do qualifies as procrastination Technically.
She's getting better and better. It's
yours. If you think about it how procrastination is defined. It's it's delaying despite an expected cost.
And you don't think there's a cost you actually see a benefit.
That's right. And I've tried started things
Across the Nation. That's just the way
you have tried starting the is 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 write this book chapter or you know, finally sitting down to research some papers for an episode, but I'm thinking about it all the time. Yeah, maybe much to the dismay of people.
My life, you know, I'm I'm constantly thinking about these things. I mean walking to take out the recycle. I'll have ideas and then I'll write them down. I constantly am writing things down voice memos into my phone. I have a method of capture where I basically try and just grab everything and then filter out. What's useful. Do you have a process like that for for gleaning
ideas a little bit I do now. So when when G Haitian and I started this research on procrastination she had she had come to me. She's very creative doctoral student and she said,
I have my best ideas when I'm procrastinating.
And it was it was one of those moments where I didn't believe her but I thought it was an interesting enough idea that it was worth exploring and I said show me get let's get some data. Let's see if we can we can test this and she ended up Gathering data in a Korean company where she surveyed people on how often they procrastinate and then got their supervisors to rate their creativity and sure enough found that people who procrastinate sometimes were rated as more creative than people who rarely do like me the procrastinators.
And I remember asking her what about the chronic procrastinators? And she's like, I don't know they never filled out my survey.
Yeah, is that recall from that paper? There's an inverted U shape function with procrastination on the vertical axis and and and creativity on the horizontal axis event flipped. Sorry. Okay. So explain to me then the relationship between procrastination and
creativity Yeah. So basically the peak of creativity is in the middle of
procrastination. Okay. Got it.
And yeah, there's a there's an upside down U curve there. And so then I thought this was fascinating. So then we go into the lab to say can we replicate this? Can we control it in an experiment? And the hardest part of that was how do you randomly assign people to procrastinate to my knowledge never been done before and we eventually figured out that we could give people a bunch of tasks to do and then tempt them with highly entertaining YouTube videos that were placed on their screen and we put different numbers of YouTube videos there so that you know, there's only
And you're not tempted to procrastinate much if there are four you're probably going to get sucked into a little bit of a YouTube spiral if they're eight. You might be putting off the task. That's much less exciting than then, you know watching Jimmy Kimmel's Mean Tweets for
example, and this was done in a fairly naturalistic
environment for this particular people are on a computer. They're asked to you know to solve some created 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
Who were attempted to procrastinate moderately ended up generating the most creative ideas? So why is that there are a couple things that happen and you have to look at both sides of the curve. So what's wrong with the procrastinators? And also what happens to the the extreme procrastinators and in both cases? What happens is you end up with a little bit of tunnel vision. So when I dive right into a task, I'm stuck with my first ideas and I don't wait long enough to incubate and get my best ideas. I'm less likely to reframe the problem.
Less likely to access remote knowledge because I'm just I'm just diving right in and meanwhile The Chronic procrastinators end up in the same boat because they don't get started until the last minute and so they have to rush ahead with the easiest idea to implement as opposed to really developing the most novel idea and meanwhile the people in the middle who you know starting to feel that pressure of wow, you know, I respond by wheels for 10 minutes watching a bunch of YouTube videos. I'm running out of time for this task. They still have enough time to work on the ideas that were active in the back of there.
Mine's and that gives them a shot at more novel ideas. So I've tried to adopt this to answer question. I've tried to adopt this as my process now to say I will still dive into a project ahead of schedule, but I will not commit to an idea until I've let it incubate for a few weeks and I'm working on other things where as an earlier version of me like when I 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.
But it's far more creative.
What are your thoughts about some of what you described being in an unconscious way of seeding the mind and the unconscious with an idea. So for instance, let's take a School academic scenario where students get an assignment and the assignment is contained within a folder and it just says assignment, okay, and it's do in a particular date and it says do on that particular date and they're given the folder but they have no sense of what the assignment is.
It is you can imagine one category of procrastinator that will take that thing and put it down and avoid looking at it entirely versus another category of procrastinator that will Flip Flip it open and take a look at okay. This is going to be an essay on you know, I don't know something about an economic theory in the late 1700s close it and then procrastinate there is an idea which I frankly I subscribe to a little bit because we recently did this series on Mental Health not
Walnuts, but mental health with dr. Paul Conti where he talked extensively about the unconscious and how the unconscious mind is always working with ideas things that we are concerned about performance these sorts of things even if we're not aware of them. What what are your thoughts about the creativity that seeded by slight procrastination being related to actually knowing what you're procrastinating on specifically.
I think it turns out to be I don't want to say essential but critical so one of the things we found is
Is in order for moderate procrastination to fuel creativity, you have to be intrinsically motivated by the thing you're procrastinating on interesting. And so 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 gonna do any subconscious processing. You're not going to have any unexpected connections between this topic and something else you've learned learned about or been curious about if you're interested in the problem then
When you put it off, you're much more likely to still keep it active in the back of your mind. And that's when you begin to to see you know, I imagine you could explain the biology of this. I imagine for example, there's there's probably there's probably more neural networks that are connecting. You probably get you get access to ideas that previously would have been sort of separate nodes. And so I think that you want to
Know what the topic is, right? You don't want to just see the blank assignment. But you also have to find a reason that this is exciting to you. Otherwise, you're going to avoid it as opposed to letting it percolate
that brings us to the topic of intrinsic motivation and I'd like to link that up with the topic of performance. So when I was in university, there were many topics that I was excited to learn about some more than others, of course, but occasionally I'd be in a class or I'd get an assignment that frankly I had minimal.
Interested never zero but minimal interest and as a way of dealing with that I embarked on a process of literally lying to myself and just telling myself. Okay. I'm super interested in reading this and I'm going to force myself to be interested in reading it and lo and behold I would start falling in love with certain things. Maybe he was it was even the, you know, the arrival of a word that I didn't recognize and then I would go look it up and I knew I was studying for the GRE at that time. So I had filed that away. I still have my notebooks of all the vocabulary.
Larry words that I learned in the course of my university courses that frankly made the verbal portion of the GRE pretty easy, you know, which if you ever try and study for that the end it's pretty tough to commit all those new words to let to memory and context so I could find little hooks and and through those hooks I could kind of Ratchet my way into a larger interest and then lo and behold I'm really interested in Greek mythology, you know that actually like that one at first, but I didn't have to trick myself but
No, maybe we could spend a little bit of time talking about what is true intrinsic motivation. Is it always reflexive can we make ourselves intrinsically motivated about us given topic or scenario or group of people and then let's talk about how intrinsic motivation links to Performance because there's a rich literature on this as I recall and I remember, you know, the Stanford study of rewarding kids for things. They were already not very motivated to do it we could touch on that a little bit and remind people who haven't heard about it.
But I'm fascinated by this topic because I feel like so much of life is about doing things that initially we don't feel that excited to do. Yeah and yet succeeding in life, you know until you can afford to offload your administrative work to somebody else which hopefully but you know by now you have to get it done, right? This is fundamental to being a functional human being frankly not just successful in air quotes but functional we got to do stuff that we don't enjoy doing.
Yeah, so I think
We can talk about a couple different ways to nurture intrinsic motivation we can think about how the task itself is designed we could think about reward systems and then we can think about also the things we say to ourselves and others which I hope her not lies, but rather persuasive attempts, let's start on that one. Actually. I don't know a lot of people who are that good at deliberate
self-deception. Well, I like to think it was only around a particular set of goal motivated Pursuits, but at that time for me also,
Is survival as I mentioned I didn't do well in high school. I really want to perform well in University, but I knew that working just for the grade wasn't going to carry me. It was it felt catabolic and I don't know maybe I at that age I was still in the window of heightened neuroplasticity. 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 Elliot Aronson, 's classic research on cognitive dissonance where he would he would ask you to go and tell somebody else a task you hated is really interesting. And if he paid you a lot to do it, you still hated the task because you had a justification like I got 20 bucks to you know to kind of FIB a little bit about this task, you know, the task is bad, but I did it for the for the payment when he paid you one dollar to go and tell somebody that
You loved a task that you didn't you ended up liking it more.
Wow, and maybe I shouldn't be surprised but maybe you should tell me why I shouldn't be surprised because I hope people got what you just said very clearly and if they didn't if you don't like doing something going and reporting to somebody else how great that thing is. So lying about it to somebody else is one way to increase the degree to which you like or enjoy that behavior or topic and if you're paid twenty dollars,
To go lie to somebody in the positive direction. So against your true belief. It's less effective in shifting your underlying effect about that thing your emotions then if you're paid less,
correct, exactly. Now, I think obviously in the experiment lying was an easy way to show the effect but in real life, I think the way that you want to apply this is to say, all right. I've got to find something about this task that's interesting to me and then in the process of explaining it to somebody else. I'm going to convince myself because I'm
The argument from somebody I already like and trust that also chosen chosen the reasons that I find compelling as opposed to hearing somebody else's reasons. And so I think there's this goes to the point that you were making which is if you're trying to find a hook to make a topic intriguing you've got to figure out. Okay. What is it that would make this fascinating to me and in a lot of cases what you're looking for is a curiosity Gap. I think social scientists like to talk about curiosity as an itch.
That you have to scratch. So there's something you want to know and you don't know it yet. So I would say I tell my students often like take your least favorite class and find a mystery or a puzzle like something that you you just do not know the answer to like I actually have talked with our kids about this like what what really happened to King Tut do you know, can you get to the bottom of that and all of a sudden? I wonder I need to Google it and then I need to see if Wikipedia has credible information on this and the more you learn about that the more
And it becomes and I think that's that's the beginning of the process of finding intrinsic motivation. I see so
inherent in your answer is the idea that there's something wired into our neural circuits and therefore psychology that Curiosity as a verb.
The act of being curious and seeking information where well and I should say I Define curiosity and I hopefully you'll disagree with me or agree. Either way. It doesn't matter as long as we can get a bit deeper understanding I Define curiosity as a desire to find something out where you are not attached to a particular
outcome. Yes. Is that right? Yeah, I in Psychology is typically defined as just wanting to know and that means you're driven by the question not a particular answer which is exactly what you're driving
at. Okay, great. So and I think it was Dorothy Parker that
It the cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for
curiosity as there shouldn't be a care for curiosity.
So and by the way folks, we don't know what neural circuits subserved curiosity in the brain is about it's got to be a distributed Network. There's no brain area for curiosity, but it's got to be linked up with the reward systems of dopamine etcetera in some way because when one discovers something new that satisfies some curiosity, that's clearly there's a there's an internal reward.
R okay, let me back up. So if your child or an adult is
Dreading working exploring a topic or going about an assignment of any kind. You will give them a question that they then need to resolve. What if the assignment is like rake the leaves off the front lawn. Do you do you say, you know count the leaves or I mean, how does one get past the sort of procrastination and generate some intrinsic motivation for things that one dreads where it's unlikely that they're going to discover.
Some knowledge. That's exceedingly useful for the
future. You always start with. Okay. What's the first experiment? I can run find the most interesting looking leaf for your favourite leaf, and then that that lasts for about two minutes and like okay now it's a lot of leaves there. Right? I think not all tasks can be made intrinsically motivating to everyone and so when when intrinsic motivation is difficult to find what you want to substitute with is is a sense of purpose maybe a better way to say that is when the process is not interesting to you. You need to find a meaningful outcome. So
There's there's some research on the boring but important effect where kids who have a purpose for learning this goes through high school and think you know, this is not just interesting to me, but I'm going to be able to use this knowledge to help other people one day they are more persistent and they're studying they end up getting better grades. And so I think in terms of 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'd say with the you know, the raking leaves. Let's try to connect that task to something that looks that you care about are you going to be pleasantly surprised your parents when they get home. Are you going to you know have a place to play soccer that you didn't before and I think then the, you know, the process of getting to that I guess I would say is if you're trying to motivate yourself. It's a little bit harder than if you're trying to motivate somebody else on this if I was going to motivate somebody else.
Take a page out of the motivational interviewing Playbook where I would say Okay, Andrew actually this place that for a second. So you're going to make a pile of leaves. It's a two-hour task 0 to 10. How excited are you about that? 33 really? I'm surprised. I thought you were gonna say 0 or 1. Hmm. Why is it not lower?
I like any sort of physical activity because it allows me to move and I just like moving my
body. There we go. Okay, so you just identified a potential source of purpose for that activity.
And I don't have a I don't have a vested interest in convincing you to do this task. I am genuinely curious about what would motivate you to want to do it. And as you start to articulate it boom self-persuasion kicks in
love it. I'm going to start using these these approaches right at your own risk as we all know quality nutrition influences, of course our physical health, but also our mental health and our cognitive functioning our memory our ability to learn new things and to focus and we know that one of the most important
Features of high quality nutrition is making sure that we get enough vitamins and minerals from high-quality unprocessed or minimally processed sources as well as enough probiotics and prebiotics and fiber to support basically all the cellular functions in our body including the gut microbiome. Now, I like most everybody try to get optimal nutrition from Whole Foods. Ideally mostly from minimally processed or non-processed Foods. However, one of the challenges that I and so many other people face is getting enough servings of highwomen.
High quality fruits and vegetables per day as well as fiber and probiotics that often accompany those fruits and vegetables. That's why way back in 2012 long before I ever had a podcast. I started drinking a G1 and so I'm delighted the ag-1 is sponsoring the huberman Lab podcast. The reason I started taking a G1 and the reason I still drink a G1 once or twice a day is that it provides all of my foundational nutritional needs that is it provides insurance that I get the proper amounts of those vitamins minerals probiotics and fiber to another
Sure, optimal mental health physical health and performance. If you'd like to try a G1 you can go to drink AG one.com huberman to claim a special offer. They're giving away 5 free travel packs plus a year supply of vitamin D3 K to again. That's drink AG one.com huberman to claim that special offer. I have a question about extrinsic motivation. So if
we grow up being incentivized by extrinsic things, you know, you'll get your allowance. If you blank you can spend the money that you make and you know on your paper route doing the things you really want to do.
Is there any value in those kinds of learning based incentives for kids and for adults because I mean that's the real world as well. I know plenty of people have family members that only work for a paycheck and they're pretty okay because they like spending their paycheck probably more that I you know, I'm not intrinsically attached to money. I mean I certainly have needs 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
Don't judge are they somehow existing in a in a diminished landscape of happiness 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 extrinsic rewards.
There's a so, there's a huge body of evidence on what are the effects of end extrinsic rewards on motivation and performance and I think the latest conclusions if you look at the the latest meta-analyses, so
A huge study of study is trying to accumulate what's the average effect of adding a financial incentive to a task that wasn't incentivized before or to a job where you were paid salary and now we're going to give you incentive compensation. There is a boost so in general people are more productive when they're incentivized for their output, but these incentives are better for for motivating quantity than quality. So you see people get more done, but they're not necessarily more careful or more.
Errol
they less careful unless
there are 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 incentivizes, you know being fast and careful, but I think we're where we do have to be really cautious is there's an undermining effect of extrinsic rewards on intrinsic motivation and you were you were alluding to this earlier dating back to the early 70s where we know that if we take an interesting task and then we pay you for it. You might conclude that you're only doing it for the
Come and you lose interest in the test. So the classic demonstration Mark Clapper and colleagues is kids playing video games and they're they're playing them because they're fun and then you start to add in an incentive and then when the incentives taken away, they don't want to play anymore because the meaning of the task has changed and now I'm doing it because I want to get something out of it as opposed to I love the process. I think that that that phenomenon does not have to exist so we know for example at work if managers
Yes, as long as they give people autonomy, they don't present the rewards in a controlling way. So instead of saying, you know Andrew in order to earn this you need to do the following work if they say hey look, you know, I'd really love it. If you you know, if you would deliver the following in order to make that worth your while I'm offering this incentive people react very differently when they have a sense of choice and control. So I think that that's I guess the starting point in the presence of autonomy. I don't think there's
Your downside of extrinsic rewards. I think you also have to be careful that yeah, I guess that you're not over justifying the task. In other words, you're not you're not swapping people's intrinsic reason for doing it. But you're adding a reason to try it. So actually if we if we go to a different domain for a second so you look at kids who don't want to eat their vegetables extrinsic incentives are very effective to get kids to try vegetables for the first time, but then the hope is that
That they discover a vegetable or two that they don't mind and then they find reasons to keep doing it. And I think that that's how I want a lot of rewards to work. I don't think that rewards should be carrots that we dangle to try to control people's behavior. I think they should be symbols of how much we appreciate in value a particular behavior. And if you frame them that way it's a lot easier for people to say. Yeah, you know what I'm that that reward is something that I really want, but I'm not only doing the task for
Reward
yeah that that you basically answered the question. I was going to ask which is and your risk of sounding new agey. But we are sitting in California I could imagine that when one is focused on the lsats tranzec rewards so of physical tasks or cognitive tasks for an extrinsic reward, if I'm focusing on the extrinsic reward. I'm also air quotes again not present right? I'm thinking about the outcome. I'm not thinking about process and
And I think there's you perhaps you can flush out some of what this is exactly. But I think there's a fairly extensive data to support the idea that when we are physically and mentally present to the tasks that we're going to perform better and presumably are intrinsic liking of that task or performing that task increases as well. Is that true?
Yeah, I think so, I think so if we want to break down the mechanisms for why intrinsic motivation is useful for for performance one you touched on earlier its focus of attention your it's much easier.
Find flow when you're intrinsically motivated you get into that state of deep absorption where time melts away. So you mentioned, you know, sort of either speeding up or slowing down your sense of time. You forget where you are. Sometimes you even lose track of your identity and you're just you're just merged into the task. And so that that that concentration is helpful. There's also a greater persistence effect that when you enjoy what you're doing you're less likely to give up in the face of obstacles. You're more likely to think about it when you're not doing the task and come up with great ideas and
So, you know, I think there's there's a working harder. There's a working longer. There's a working smarter and there's also a thinking more clearly affect.
This is a brief but related tangent one of the things that I found incredibly difficult in recent years is that you know, most of my life really since I was a small kid I was forging for things and then, you know, I used to give lectures on Monday in class if they let me until they eventually stopped me about the stuff. I was reading about all weekend so down early
Rotten egg and the professor Ariel 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. I'm like, wow, this is really cool. These findings are oh so cool. There's a problem, which is that now I have an opportunity to cast that out to the world through social media.
We all do this could be
but I'm sorry you're on social
media from time to time. I do much you're all over my feet you and I both do our own social media, by the way, which I really appreciate. I think he won can always detect if someone else has handling someone's 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 comment section and always encourage comments I learned from it. Frankly. Love is a strong word I learned
From it, you know and you and I were weaned in the academic culture where frankly the kind of hazing that you one receives. An academic culture is very different than the kind of hazing the one receives on social media. But let's just say that if you come up through Academia, you develop a pretty thick skin. I do
have to say though that there was a part of me that was really surprised. When I started posting on social that I love. I love constructive criticism. I was unprepared for the number of people who will need York criticize a study without even looking at whether the methods are rigorous.
All right, Mike. Come on. If I posted this surely it's at least worth considering the possibility that there's strong evidence behind
it. Right? Well, that's where a brief I want to call it a rhetoric but a response of you know, you know clearly you should read the study further because I think you'll be satisfied with the answer or something. I don't know but I agree it can be a little bit harsh in there sometimes but you know, the social media channels are I think how you know, they have it's a
Blade there obviously have their issues, but can be a wonderful opportunity to share information and share it quickly. The problem is that it takes me out of what I was doing initially, which was learning searching for those gems with which to share later and I think there's a broader landscape to consider this where people for instance are I was at the beach yesterday. It was just absolutely spectacular day at the beach especially for this time of year and everyone was taking pictures of that experience on their phone and
and probably sharing that experience either social media or with friends. This is very different than taking a photograph and not seeing that photograph until later or not sending it out. And so there are now near infinite number of circumstances where we are taken out of the rewarding experience. I should rephrase that we are taking ourselves out of the rewarding experience and focusing on a different rewarding experience that I think by definition is an extrinsic reward. So we are taking ourselves.
Out of are intrinsically rewarding experiences and activating these extrinsic rewards. And do you think in any way that's undermining our experience of things that we really enjoy again not to demonize social media or these channels, but I've personally found it difficult to refrain from sharing this knowledge. I'm so excited to share but I deliberately delay and there's a lot I have a deep list of folders full of things that I want to post but I've just doing it, you know systematically over.
Time because I really fight the temptation to do this mostly because I want to continue to enjoy this learning process in this seeking process so
much. Yeah, I feel the same the same I feel torn. I think I think it 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 it difficult to plan the day and I feel that every day. I think I mean I even I felt at this morning I was like, okay.
Time to it's time to leave to come to the the huberman podcast like 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. I figured maybe Yes, actually that's a
built-in acceptable excuse with you. I think I mean, I think everybody experiences a version of this and
it's definitely gotten worse with with social media and with smartphones. I think so one of the most startling data points for me was Gloria Mark first put this on my radar before covid. The average person was checking email 72 times a day.
How do you ever concentrate for more than a couple minutes if you're self interrupting that often? You can't Brigade Schulte has a great term for this she calls it time confetti. And she says we're taking these meaningful blocks of time and we're slicing them up into these like tiny little dots of confetti. And not only can we not accomplish anything. We're also eroding our own sense of Joy because it's really hard to enjoy the the 32nd blip of time that you get on a task.
And I think we know a lot more about the existence of these problems than how to solve them. But one thing we do know is blacking out on interrupted time is Meaningful. There's a great Leslie Pirlo experiment where she takes engineers and she has them she sets a quiet time policy no interruptions, Tuesday, Thursday Friday before noon.
Sixty-five percent above average productivity.
Could you repeat the the protocol
it got? Yeah. So quiet time. They're a couple iterations of it. But I think the most effective one was Tuesday Thursday Friday, no meetings. No interruptions. No slack no emails before noon
and during those periods of no interruptions one could tend to whatever their primary purpose is at work. Yeah, you guys are for me might be podcasting. Obviously. I would donate my phone in here never do but it doesn't mean no interaction with
One else. It just means focusing on the major
tasks exactly and you come in with a clear sense of priority and purpose and I don't think there's anything magical about Tuesday Thursday Friday before noon. It's just the idea of setting a boundary and collectively committing to it. That seems to be important and I think when I think about this, I'd be I'd be really curious about your take on on Chrono types here because I think one thing I've learned in the last couple of years is that if you're a you're a morning person you do your best analytical and creative thinking in the
Earning and so the quiet time block would work very well for for me as a morning person. If you're a night owl you probably want that block in the late afternoon and I was encouraged there was some evidence during covid that people have their best meetings right after lunch that there something like 30 percent less likely to multitask in an after lunch meeting and I guess, you know, you could probably unpack the the food coma, you know getting re-energized by other people, but it's led me to wonder if we
To 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 have a lot of questions about this for you. But I love that sequence it certainly fits with my natural rhythms. I think there's ample evidence to support the fact that provided one is sleeping. Well at night and is on a more or less a standard schedule when I say stand rhyming going to bed somewhere between let's say 9:30 and
thirty P. M-- waking up sometime between let's say 6:00 a.m. And 8 a.m. Maybe 5:30 to 7:30 something like that. So not highly unusual Night Owl or super early bird for people that are following that sort of schedule the first let's just say from 0 to 8 hours after waking there tends to be a fairly robust increase in all the catecholamines. So dopamine norepinephrine epinephrine which generally
To generally speaking lead to increases in alertness attention and focus that are great for analytic work great for implementation of strategies that you already understand and you need to churn through a lot of stuff. And of course there's a big increase in the morning, especially if you morning sunlight a healthy increase I should say in cortisol cortisol is not bad folks, you know, you want cortisol, but you want that Peak early in the day, we know that okay. So for most people it seems
At least my understanding is that that period of time 0 to 8 or 8 hours after waking or so is best devoted to the quote-unquote most critical tasks. But one of the common problems is that people take that ability to implement an own strategy and they start battering back all the emails or talking to all by the way talking to co-workers is great and it's often required but it's what the question is whether or not it's productive conversation or whether or not it's just conversation and we
They have a lot of energy early in the day and I'm obsessed with the idea of neural energy as opposed to just caloric energy. So there were talking about neural energy and then post lunch. So really I was we get to the sort of you know, 9 to 17 hours after waking there is a dip in autonomic arousal that during the middle of the day the postprandial dip those are post-lunch sleepiness that can be partially offset by delaying your morning caffeine a bit if you have the afternoon crash, but it's interesting that you know, that more productive meetings and less tasks which
And distraction occurred 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 sort of optimal State relaxed, but focused, you know, you're not sleepy but you also don't have so much intrinsic energy that you're not talking to a bunch of things because I think a lot of people do feel that way, you know, and I'm drinking, you know, Double Espresso right now late mid-morning late morning.
And you know, I can sit still but I think certain Zoom meetings. How do I say this? I don't want to offend any of my colleagues. I mean they are boring enough that they are not content Rich enough to grab all my attention and nowadays. Of course, there are multiple screens. Typically, I've got two phones in a computer and you have to really spend some work to flip over those phones while I'm on a zoom and things like that. So maybe if you say so so it's maybe the reduction in autonomic arousal that that supports what you just described but I don't
No, my thinking my understanding rather was that creative work and kind of brainstorming was best accomplished in the late afternoon. I've noticed when lecturing I'd be curious what your experience is with in University lecturers when I held courses in the evening. I used to like to hold my courses 5 to 7 p.m. Or even 7:00 to 9:30 p.m. When I was teaching undergraduates that people were much looser and more relaxed and I always
I thought that might have something to do with an increase in Gaba transmission. That's known to happen late in late evening. The people are just kind of more relaxed and less social anxiety. They've been around people for much of the day and worry I sent back more Reflections than answers. I don't have any firm Neuroscience explanations for what you described. But but there are some emerging theories about how that might work and it has this 0 to 9 hours face 19 to 17 hours Phase 2 and then of course from 17 to 24 hours.
I'll call it phase 3 you should be asleep. Yeah, ideally
well that I think there's there's a there's a confound in your teaching experience which is undergrads often sleep in until what noon, or they might be up until 4
a.m. Or at least 10 a.m. Seems to be a typical rise time for the
undergrad. So in the morning class might be too early for them to be fully awake. But there is there's some brand new evidence that at least on creativity at work. I read a series of those three studies recently showing that early birds actually did do more creative.
In the morning and in part, I think again the I don't I don't think any neuroscientist has has touched the mechanisms on this yet. But in terms of the psychological processes early on there's just there seems to be a benefit of of the energy level and some of that energy leads to more Divergent thinking and later. If you're a morning person, you might lose the ability to diverge quite as much and so you end up in a more conventional space of thought does that does that track at all with your understanding of how it might play?
out in the
brain minor changes to be a little bit in it would be individual but you know, there is something to these liminal States between sleep and waking so maybe we can wrap a convenient bow around what I said in what you just said, which is that we know that in the transition States into and out of sleep and it doesn't necessarily have to be within the first half hour in and out of sleep that there seems to be more Divergent thinking or at least activation of neural networks that
Are not as constrained as one observes when they're in a sheer task and strategy implementation mode, right? I mean, I think that's similar to the shower affect the shower effect. So people have ideas in the shower or while running or while falling asleep or my best ideas always come within the first hour after waking that's why I carry a notebook around and much to the dismay of people in my life often times. I don't want to hear or more talk to anyone first thing in the morning. This is problematic and I had to make adjustments will talk about adjustments between
and productivity and control and and family interactions. This is something I know you've worked on and written about but those liminal states are interesting and I'd love your thoughts on this. I've had several guests on this podcast talk about their creative process namely Rick Rubin is famous for his work in music producing also has a great podcast tetragrammaton as well as called ice ratha colleague of mine who's really in the point 0 0
Zero one percent of super talented bioengineers neuroscientist who also happens to be a full-time clinical psychiatrist and has five children. Okay, and I asked them about their creative process because both of them are very creative Carl's process involves the following late at night for him, but it could really be any time of day deliberately making his body as still as possible and forcing himself to think in complete sentences Rick's creative process, although
it includes a lot of different things has a lot to do with also getting very still lying down. Okay other folks that I've spoken to academics and an artist's have referred to getting their body into motion, but quieting their mind. So these are two opposite processes one case the body is still but the mind is deliberately very active in the other scenario. The body is very active but they're making their mind sort of in free association not still but they're not deliberately.
King about any one thing fascinated and I'm obsessed with this maybe you and I could work on this, you know, I'm due for a sabbatical maybe we could figure this out because I never seen anyone study this before right because the the the nervous system know the nervous system. I'm not aware of anyone has done it formally either the nervous system. Of course is a is a brain body phenomenon. And so what happens when we sort of cut off the deliberate operations of brain or body and it doesn't seem to matter whether or not it's brain or body as long as one is deliberately shut off. And so anyway, I'd love your thoughts.
Thoughts on this. I don't consider myself a like an ultra creative or creative type to any great degree. But
me neither. That's why but I'm fascinated.
You're right, but I'm doing it right but that's what but I'm fascinated by these deliberate tactics 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'll just be running along the my goodness. I wasn't even thinking but now I need to write this down. Okay, and then continue I tried the dicer author.
Chin, the Reuben approach actually just spent a week with Rick overseas and indeed. He spends a lot of time just still thinking and it's a very hard practice to get to get consistent with.
I wonder I wonder if their individual differences here on which needs to be stable or steady. I'm think you know, I think about huge part of creativity is is overriding your default instincts. And if you're somebody who's default is to have your mind constantly.
Going then quieting would probably shift your your train of thought to something more original or unconventional. The opposite might be true. If you have a naturally quiet mind, I would imagine you need to you need to sort of jolt yourself out of that with lots of access to you know to free-ranging thoughts. And so it'd be interesting actually to study whether we can predict what you should still based on your personality.
Yeah, I want and maybe what we could do in that study. I think we have a collaboration Brewing, you know, there's a joke, you know to to sign
Just 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 the movement artifact but and just look at net resting Network activation and compare that to resting Network activation when people are completely still and forcing themselves to think and deliberate it sends and then look at the overlap in that Venn diagram. That's what's of interest to me. They may be completely different brain States. They might actually have more similarity than
Aces
I wonder that if you can tie that to differences in the quality and quantity of output. So I would imagine that one of the benefits of either kind of movement is that you you end up increasing the volume of ideas, which we know is good for variety and ultimately increases the probability that you stumble onto something new but then I think this 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
People have many terrible ideas. In fact the most creative people have the most horrible ideas because they just have a lot of ideas and I think that maybe there's a there's a way in which quieting either your body or your mind allows you to gain some distance from the idea and see whether it's boneheaded or
promising.
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Number 28 inside tracker is offering 50% off their full website. Again, that's inside tracker.com huberman along those lines when one is trying to gauge the quality of their ideas. How do you cope with or how does one cope with not placing a judge on that that causes some, you know false negatives where you're where you're wiping out great ideas because you know, Rick Rubin talks a lot about
You know don't give the audience what they want. They don't know what they want. They haven't seen it yet. If it's a truly creative idea, they haven't seen it. And but of course we all have to develop our own sense of taste. So well, how does this process work for you? I mean you written about and worked on a tremendous range of topics and always, you know, I must say with with such a rigor and such Clarity of communication about those topics. Yeah, it's absolutely true. I mean like 100% so we say around here no weak sauce, you know and
there's no weak sauce in your game. It's incredible. So when do you get your ideas? And how do you filter those ideas?
I feel like the wind could be any time. I think the I mean 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 any one 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
Any moment, the the filtering process for me is its evolved over the last few years? What I what I do now is if I'm let's say 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 their deep-seated in organizational psychology others are you know, very far outside, but curious about the topics. I'm interested in and I asked them for a 0 to 10 score.
This is something I learned to do is as a springboard diver where I would I would take off and you know, I'm doing a few flips or twists and I think my dive is good, but I can't see it because I'm hurling in midair and it's a everything's a blur. And so I have to rely on my coach to tell me if it was any good. I feel like creative 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, you know, interesting or useful to them.
So I asked for the 0 to 10 and no one ever says 10 and then I use that as a calibration mechanism. So if everybody is in the seven or eight range, I know that I'm onto something promising and now I need to refine it if I get a bunch of twos threes three and a half's I did there need to rethink the idea or dramatically rewrite how I'm positioning it and I think one of the mistakes a lot of people make is they know they need feedback on their ideas. They go to one or two people.
And they start to feel a little bit defensive or threatened and their ego gets involved and then they don't ask for any more what they don't realize is it's actually less painful if you get more feedback because when eight different people critique your work you start to realize that a few of the comments that sort of Brews 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 to focus on that and so it really helps to filter. What are the
What are the revisions I need to make what are the problems and complaints? I need to pay attention to versus what can I ignore because maybe this product was not for that person.
I'm recalling when I was a postdoc. I had a manuscript fully prepared and I worked in a laboratory where I didn't work on the same thing as my postdoc advisor. He was very gracious in letting me be the outlier and he said well, I don't know anything about this topic. So before you submit it to this
fairly prestigious store very frankly. Very prestigious Journal. I'll be honest you should I go down the hall and hand it to so and so I don't want to touch it was because I'm still in the same department and I gave it to him. This is individual and he looked and he said yeah, you know, it looks interesting but I don't think there's going to be a whole lot of interest in this it's just like not I was like no way like this. I think this is really cool. But I was pretty dismayed sounds like our guy so what do I do is I went back to my advisor and thankfully he's a bit of an iconoclast and he said,
That's the best feedback you could have gotten definitely submit it to that particular journal and I must say that paper got accepted faster than any other paper. I've never had an experience like that. I mean it required some revisions. I remember thinking like, wow what an unusual response to after having instructed me to go ask a more senior colleague raises at that time assistant professor and then to get the net essentially negative response and then to take that as like, you should definitely send it out really taught me a lesson that sometimes
This one needs to invert their their action according to the negative feedback. They get not always but that was an end of one. Okay, so it's not shouldn't be extrapolated to many circumstances. But basically led me to not seek out feedback prior to submission of things terribly often. I mean I check information obviously prior to podcast I check the validity of the information and podcast and papers, but it made me realize that people
Opinions can be like highly idiosyncratic and in some cases outright wrong and really the the opinion of the journals what we were What mattered most in terms of getting it accepted or not. So, how do you you said give it to the greatest number of people but if it's anything like comments on social media, there's a salience to negative comments. So how should we filter positive versus negative feedback?
Well, there's a there's a meta-analysis here. This is clear and Denise e looking at
100 Years of feedback research and they found that what drives the utility of feedback is not whether it's positive or negative. It's whether it focuses on the task or on the self. So if I tell you that your work is terrible you're going to get defensive if I tell you that your work is great. You're going to get complacent if I tell you here's the specific thing that I liked about your work. You're going to try to learn to repeat that and if I tell you here's the thing I didn't like you're going to try to see if you can.
Fix it, so I actually think we should worry less about whether the feedback is encouraging or discouraging and more about how do I make sure that I get input that's going to allow me to learn from my strengths and also overcome my weaknesses. And actually I one of things I've learned recently is there's some I would say a growing body of evidence at this point that asking for feedback is not the best way to get people to help you because when you ask for feedback you end up getting two groups of people you get cheerleaders and you get critics.
And cheerleaders are basically applauding your best self critics are attacking your worst self. What you want as a coach, which is somebody who helps you become a better version of yourself. And the way you get people to coach you is not to say give me feedback because they will then look at the past and tell you what you screwed up or what you did. Right? What you want is to say, can you give me advice for next time and then they look at the future and they'll give you either a note on something to repeat or something to correct? And this is such a subtle shift that it can make a big difference and ruining things I guess.
I myself applying this to a lot is after giving speeches. I used to get off stage and say I would love some feedback and you get back a bunch of oh, you know, I really enjoyed that. Thanks. What do I do with that information? I'm trying to learn how to get better. And when I shift the question to say, what's the one thing I could do better next time. It's like, oh don't open with a joke. The audience can tell you were joking frequently. It's give me a little bit more of a through-line. You focused a lot on a bunch of
Of interesting points, but I lost the connective tissue and there's actionable suggestions are much more likely to come when you just ask for a tip as opposed to an evaluation.
That's so good. I think I'm going to just pause for a second and they're never taken a possum. I've taken one occasional boss for to be honest, but they're very rare as the audience knows. Oh, that's just gazillion-dollar advice because I think that
Everyone has an ego. We all want to perform. Well, we'd like to perform better over time and negative feedback hurts and it can hurt a little or a lot depending on how defensive we are. But a tool like you just described to remove some of that defensive armor that we all have and actually let the information in a way that's constructive is really great. What you described I think is a way to create constructive criticism, but the
Constructive part is really coming from within as opposed to saying I'd like some constructive criticism and then hoping that the criticism is actually constructive. So you're taking control over the process in a healthy way in a
benevolent way. That's the goal. And I think the big question that comes up for a lot of people at this point is okay. So I get somebody to give me advice but it might still stink. How do I get better at taking a constructively and I think probably my favorite technique on this I learned from Sheila Keen she calls it the the second score.
And the idea is that when somebody gives you a piece of criticism, that's your first score. So let's say you know, they in my in my world they gave me a three and a half and I want to know how I can do better next time. How do I get myself to focus on that? What I do is say I want to get a 10 for how well I took the three and a half and that's the second score. I want to evaluate myself on how well I took the first score I think about this almost every day. There was actually I tell you a quick story. So when I was
Right out of my doctorate. I got asked to teach a motivation class for Air Force generals and Colonels. I was 25. I think 25 26, you know, there are there all twice my age. They've got thousands of flying hours. They've got billion dollar budgets. They've got well, you know this community. Well their nicknames are Striker and Sand Dune and I was extremely intimidated. So I walked in there and I thought I had to impress them and
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.
That's true. I can't argue with that and then another route I gain nothing from this session, but I trust the instructor gain useful insight.
And that was devastating. That's like can I I would really like to transform into an actual bear and hibernate next four months. And then maybe I'll come out of a hole ready to hear this and have that option. I had committed to teach a second session week later. So all I could do is figure out how am I going to hear this feedback and really take it seriously and I guess I applied a version of the second score and I said all right there. Yeah, there's some generals that are going to come back and see me again, and I've got to prove to
And that I was open to feedback and one of the things I heard loud and clear was that they valued humility and I had led with too much confidence, which was just insecurity Mast and so I thought okay, how do I how do I change the equation and walked in looked at the room? And I said I know what you're all thinking right now. What can I possibly learn from a professor? Who's 12 years old?
Dead Silence. Oh, no, it's just this is going to go horribly wrong. And then one of the guys in the audience jumps in is like oh that's ridiculous. You got to be at least 13. Everybody started laughing it broke the ice and I think what I was trying to do was to take myself off the pedestal and say look, I heard your feedback. You told me that you didn't think I had anything to teach you and I've got to acknowledge that right up front and be open to the fact that that's true. And so I want to come in here and learn from you.
And I want to see if I can carry a conversation where we all end up learning and the feedback was night and day different afterward. I one person wrote although jr. And experience the professor dealt with the evidence in an interesting way. All right, I'll take it and there's something really powerful about about saying look, you know, I can't change the fact that they hated my session. What I can do is convince them that I was motivated to learn from their criticism. I love
this concept of the second score and thank you for sharing that story. I think.
Thank you know very often we hear about people like you who if people didn't catch the math in there. You were a PhD by age 25 and as far as I know that the youngest tenured professor at Penn at 28, so these are outrageous outrageous lie impressive metrics of accomplishment, but for you to share a story about, you know, less than Optimal Performance and how you adjusted to it and and the incorporation of the this second score that you were.
Going to I think is it's really appreciated because I think that as much as we hear, you know, oh, you know, Jordan took many more, you know free throws and everyone just thinks about all the ones he made, you know, people think about all the ones he made that's the way the game works. That's the way the mind works I should say. So it's appreciate that you flush it out with a personal example. I too would want to turn into a bear and disappear but I would but I think that it's really impressive what you did and I it makes me think that the second score of getting a 10 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, what I keep coming back to is this idea that we should be focusing more on verbs and less on nouns that we love to name things and categorize them. But but when we start living life through a lot of verb processes, so instead of getting Being Fit and we think about that, you know or running as a
Inge we will think about like just running, right it becomes the less daunting and and we accomplish far more but the idea that you know in this has this their mathematical models of this. I'm sure but where you're basically talking about, you know, like an integral right as opposed to just some value. Are you talking about the slope of the line? Yeah, right. So your three and a half. How are you going to get to attend gosh, that's a huge gap and you're dealing with back on your heels psychologically from getting all this, you know, battering feedback from these, you know, these highly accomplished individuals all these experiments and you know, literally
Airing them presumably on their body so you have for you to see and it's really about creating. It's about taking control of the slope of that line from the three onward and it's really a forward-looking perspective. So, I don't think we're being on Dooley psychological here analytic. I mean, I think it's really about taking a moment State and a noun and turning it into a
verb. Yeah. I think that's right. I'm reminded of a great philosopher Homer Simpson who said that verbing weirds language, so it's harder to
Love it convert. I swear I didn't steal it from The Simpsons, but if it came from Homer Simpson, like I'm all for it. You have to I mean, that's small brain small brain, but, you know given the size of his brain and people have seen the image, you know, fairly fairly robust
knowledge. No, I think you're onto something I think verbs are active and we're drawn to them. I think a lot of times people review their past work and they just like they end up shaming an earlier version of themselves and they wallow in rumination and what we want to try to do.
Do in that situation which is easier said than done is say alright, the purpose of getting feedback or advice is not to shame. My past self is to educate My Future Self, which I think is very connected to a lot of the work on growth mindset that you've been talking about and there's been a firestorm of controversy around can we teach growth mindset in schools lately and I think what that is underscored for me is like you can't you can't expect someone to listen to One podcast episode or go through one workshop and magical.
Leave that they're capable of learning anything at any moment. This is something we have to actively work on a daily basis and part of doing that exactly. As you said is thinking about this lip and saying, all right, the person that I'm you know, I'm competing with is my past self and I want to get a little bit better today than I was yesterday.
Yeah, I think along the lines of growth mindset. Obviously, we both know Carol dweck and respect her tremendously and I realized there is some controversy now around how readily one can teach
Each growth mindset or incorporate growth mindset my understanding and love to know your thoughts on this is that when the dweck work is combined with some of the alley crumb work that is growth mindset is combined with a knowledge just a basic and true understanding that stress and the feelings of anxiety and tension that can actually be performance-enhancing when those two things are combined. I think this is the work of David Yeager and colleagues at ut-austin that
Indy growth mindset becomes more visible in our in our mindsets and performance and are there other aspects to growth mindset and other other mindsets that are now being woven into that framework that can be helpful cook because I know gosh if ever there was a great name for area of psychology growth mindset tells you everything you want everything you need and everything you sort of need to know and just the name, but we all find it difficult to
Implement I'm just telling myself. I'm not as good as something as I could be yet. It sounds great. But in moments of you know receiving feedback, that's harsh. Sometimes it's hard to
access. Yeah, it is. I think so the latest there's a McNamara at all meta-analysis and then you know, I think sort of that camp first is the the Carol and David Camp have very different views on how big the effects are but I think one thing they seem to agree on is growth mindset is more
In circumstances where people are more likely to need it. So if you think about for example kids who are impoverished or marginalized communities the message that you actually you know that you are capable of you know of evolving your skills to the point that something you're bad at today. You could be good at next year is really important when you're never heard that before and when you don't have a single person believing in you, I think we're
we're we're often missing the boat is we think all right. I'm just going to I'm going to instill this idea in a person's head and my work is done and we know that the context around you really matters. So actually Carol's done some research showing that growth mindset is more likely to have an impact when your classroom culture also and your teacher has the belief that kids are capable of learning and growing that you're you know, you're starting ability is not fixed in any subject and I think we probably for all of us as individuals.
What that means is we need to think about the the microenvironment that we put ourselves in. I think you know the his when things I think a lot about lately is scaffolding and the idea that when you're when you're trying to improve it something you don't need a permanent teacher necessarily you don't need one Mentor, you know guiding you for nine years. What you need is somebody who can give you the temporary support that allows you to scale to a New Height just like a scaffold would on a building and in learning theory basically the idea behind it.
A folding is we're going to initially give you the support you need to solve a problem. And then we're going to slowly remove the support so that you learn to do it on your own and I think that those those kinds of scaffolds are often missing. So we instill the growth mindset like I've got this belief in my head, but I don't know what I need to do to you know to put that belief into action and that's where that I guess that that to me is we have to go beyond mindset. We have to think about how do we put people in a context that allows them to put their beliefs into practice you are asking me
Let's do we need like to support growth mindset and make it effective.
Right? Yeah. I mean, we know people learn what growth 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 growth mindset with make it make it more accessible and benefit from it.
Yes. So Justin Berg and Amy reznitsky and I studied this actually we did we were looking at growth mindset at work.
And Justins. Well, he's a Stanford. I don't know if you met him
yet have none but big place but will be on the list soon if
that yeah, brilliant creativity researcher and Amy just joined us said at Wharton and has fundamentally changed the way that I think about ideas in the way that she studied how we can shape our context and just done path-breaking work there and we were interested in growth mindset and we designed an intervention where people could learn growth mindset at work.
So we taught them to think about how their skills were malleable how they could stretch their knowledge into 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 flexible building blocks that you've got a whole bunch of tasks that make up your job. Some of those are our things to do others are might be interacting.
Actions that you need to have and if you break down your job into all these tests you might have some tasks that you want to accentuate and make a bigger part of your job others that you want to try to subtract others that you might swap with a colleague and a lot of people it turns out think their jobs are fixed by their job descriptions. But in fact, you have a ton of opportunity to say wait a minute, you know, there's something I've there's a strength I have but I'm not using it right now. Is there a way we can bring that into my work and so in these couple experiments we did when we randomly assign people to learn both at their job.
Malleable and that their skills were malleable. They got a sustainable boost to their happiness that lasted at least six months. There was no cost to their performance meaning you could redesign your own job to be more enjoyable without without a drop in the effectiveness of your contributions to your workplace. And I think what I came away from that research realizing is it's not enough to just say well I can get better I can improve because very often you feel like your environment is limited like great like yeah.
I can grow but I'm stuck in a dead-end job. And so what we need to do there is is open up the opportunity for people to to innovate on their own job description and then growth mindset can begin to have an
impact love. It sounds a bit like adding a S2 growth growth mindset. So it's not growth mindset its growth mindsets because earlier you mentioned that in the classroom environment if the teacher adopts a growth mindset cast as well as the students will then you have a culture of growth mindset.
It's the interconnectedness of this and the context in which the individuals growth mindset exist. Do I have that
right? Well put yeah, we ended up calling it dual mindset, but I think making it a plural is good because you know, it's not I have this image of you know, you put a person in a cage and then tell them they're capable of growing still stuck in a cage. And so we need to we need to give them a chance to bust through those walls
super important. I hate to take us back.
To an earlier topic but there's something that I meant to ask you that I didn't and I'm absolutely needing to ask you which is your recent work or recent dish work was a few years back now and you're so prolific that I have to call it a few years back the relationship between intrinsic motivation and performance on other tasks. Yeah. Yeah. And the reason I ask this is several fold. I did two episodes of the podcast.
On ADHD and one of the things that I learned in talking to experts on ADHD people with ADHD as well as looking at some of the novel treatments everything from behavioral to prescription drug to even nutrition based was that kids and adults with clinically diagnosed ADHD are actually terrific at paying attention to things that they really enjoy or that they're super interested in. So clearly they have the capacity. It's just that they have
Deficits if you will in attending the things that are less exciting to them less intriguing to them. So if I recall correctly you have a publication that explored the relationship between intrinsic motivation and performance in other stuff. Yeah, and one of the major conclusions was that having a deep deep interest in one thing might not be the best condition for performing. Well at other less interesting task. Could you
Could you tell us about that study? What motivated you to carry out that study and what some of the major takeaways
were? Yeah, definitely you summarize it really? Well. I think the the original impetus. So this was another project with ghn and ji-hae came to me wanted to wanted to study intrinsic motivation and we were talking about what do we know about intrinsic motivation and what are the gaps in our knowledge? And one thing that has always bothered me is when 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 all sort of enjoyable experiences have costs all unpleasant experiences can have benefits. We need to we need to fill out this two-by-two of good thing bad thing good outcome bad outcome. And so my challenge to her was can you show me the Dark Side of intrinsic motivation and she came back and she said what if there's a cost of loving a task leading you to hate a test that you don't like even more
Then you did before it's like oh that's an interesting idea tracks with the basic psychology of contrast effects where you know, if you eat something delicious than your least favorite food tastes a little bit worse afterward. And so I said, let's study this so she ended up getting data from from people at work. And then we also design an experiment and sure enough. The the more passionate you are in Task 1 the more your performance suffers if task 2 is really boring and I guess what this did
for me is it made me think differently about a sequencing I used to wake up in the morning and do my most interesting tasks 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 a warm-up for me and then I have an exciting one to look forward to and if I do have a task that's boring but important. I think the performance is going to suffer less.
Interesting normally don't ask about morning routines and how one structure so today because it's highly individual completely agree. Yeah, and it depends on whether or not people have kids and their pets and you know, what other but I'll just share with you a brief anecdote. I have a friend who's a very accomplished musician. It has been for several decades now and he told me that he has a practice of after he gets off stage and he's like Stadium Stadium sellout level.
Ian has been for a long time and shows no signs of stopping just incredible but a very down-to-earth person and he said one of the first things he does when he gets off stage is to go do some menial tasks that there's no way that's true. But I've known his wife since college and she she verified that statement was like what sorts is menial tasks you're talking about. He's like, oh 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
True and I said what's this about is about humility said well, maybe a little bit but he said it actually makes it a lot easier for him to return home and deal with the kind of little things that just are out of scale with the experiences that he just had his
tapering all the way. Okay, I think
yeah. Yeah. I first of all I was so struck by the fact that he had created this process for himself so long ago and he's also somebody who's you know, he's maintained as like being the same marriage.
Are extremely long time he's extremely happy in that as family. I mean it seemed when these feel that seems to thrive and all domains of life and I'm certain that he struggles in some domain of life because everybody does but it sounds to me like a very unusual practice, but it seems to kind of relate to this that you know, he has this thing that he loves doing playing music and performing in particular and he's just, you know 0.01 percent at doing that but then just like bring himself back down to Earth because so much of life and especially family life.
Is like dealing with the the Schmutz in the inconvenience of everyday
life? Yeah, it's actually sounds like what he's doing is he's resetting his frame of reference to say if you know if I go right home then the contrast between this high octane experience. I'm having and sort of muddling through everyday life is going to be extreme. If I do something really small then family time is going to seem a lot bigger.
Yeah. So I realize I'm taking a bit of a leap from
Or study on intrinsic motivation improve and low performance in other domains. But you know to me cleaning up clean a toilet as you know, it's it's it's boring for all the wrong reasons, right? As
you said, you're not want that to be an exciting. Oh
and listen, I mean if I had to do it for a living I would your I didn't I would try and do as well as possible and but right so well, I found that study to be particularly interesting because I think that these days we we
fi high performance even conical Peak Performance something we can talk about and we forget that yes, oftentimes people who are ultra high performers can afford to pay other people to do all the other stuff, but I have to say and knowing some ultra high performers and in knowing some people in the billionaire bracket, you know, there's a high incidence of mental health issues frankly and lack of satisfaction with life that maybe even
Comes from not having to do anything besides the things that you find most intrinsically rewarding. We all think though if if I could I would spend all day doing the things that I find most intrinsically rewarding, but maybe there's something about this push-pull. We know the brain is Works in 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 it didn't I think I think
The facts are very powerful and we know I mean there's half a century of research on happiness suggesting that the comparisons we make are what matter you know, I think I think Tim Urban probably put it best when he said happiness is reality - expectations.
And if you only have enjoyable experiences, 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 the things that mundane experiences managed to do for us or maybe a better way to say it is I think one of the benefits of mundane experiences is they keep our expectations on the ground and allow us to be pleasantly surprised by you know, a task that was more interesting than we expected even though
Didn't love it.
What are your thoughts on what I call Momentum which is when I have an experience that I particularly like like if we record a podcast and I'm really excited to get it out into the world or if I have some experience that I'm left, you know, very excited by at the end that often times the energy again. I'm obsessed with this concept of neural energy the energy that I gleaned from that experience seems to have carry over into other things that you know, you're going to be much more excited is going
cross the street and get a cup of coffee feels like a bigger thing than it normally would and I would think that one could kind of ride the wake of a prior accomplishment even a small accomplishment each day and make the you know, tidying up over doing things. That one would normally find more boring less boring is that true the way you're describing contrast effects makes it seem like it's more of a cliff like that thing was great. And now this thing but I also can kind of ride high on something that happened to three days ago. Maybe even two three months ago.
If so feeling good equates to feeling good. We're feeling good accentuates the bad
stuff. This is the tension between contrast and spill over and you can see both under different conditions. I think where this is. This is a brand-new sort of I don't think anybody's reconcile those two two perspectives yet, but my hunch from having worked on the contrast part of it is we found that it was only extreme intrinsic motivation that had the performance cost on other tasks. So if you're if you're enjoying something
See if you like it that will give you a lift for other tasks. It's where this is the best thing you've ever done and now other things suck by comparison. That's where we start to see run into a problem. I also wonder if there's a domain switching effect here. I think you're alluding to this. I read some research that just came out this year showing that one of the benefits one of the surprising benefits of morning workouts is you actually have more confidence in your job because you get
Small wind like I accomplished something this morning and that gives you a sense of efficacy that you can carry over into your the start of your workday not to suggest that everyone should work out in the morning cuz I'm with you. I think everybody should you know both work and work out at a time that works for them. But I think I think there's something to be said for something went really well in one realm of my life and that boost my belief in my capability to tackle challenges in a different realm.
What about in the
that direction you were a competitive diver. I have to presume that there were days when you had lousy Dives. It must have been that that one day like every day and then you leave you know, you your shower up dry off head Ted into the rest of your day. And you know, how do we segment away from the you know, - thought spirals of like something went really poorly and now you're off into the domain of life where you can do, you know how to do the things that you're required to.
You but maybe there's some challenge in some learning involved. How do we cut Motes between negative
experiences? I think I mean the Ted lasso strategy is ideal become a goldfish 10 second memory and you don't even you don't even recall the practice you had earlier today. I think that I don't know anybody who can do that consistently and I think the more disappointing the experiences the more you tend to dwell on it.
I think when you talk about segmenting negative experiences.
I think that probably the research that I've liked best on this and I just want to make sure I capture this clearly. I basically it's a research and emotion regulation says they're there to strategies that tend to be effective one is distraction. The other is reframing 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 you know that that Fades into the background.
Thing 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 this slope my diving coach Eric best has a really great set of questions that he asks and I remember I would have finished practice. This is a terrible day. I just feel like I'm worthless as a diver and now diving was a big part of my identity. I'm gonna let my team down now I'm a bad teammate to my coaches wasting his time and like now, you know, I he could have been
training somebody much better. Like why am I doing this and Eric would ask did you make yourself better today?
And even if 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? Like yeah, I gave a little tip to a teammate. You know, I made a joke that you know that made everybody laugh and I was like great then it wasn't a bad day.
And I think this is this is an example of what good reframing looks like to say, okay. The goal wasn't to be great. It was to be better. The goal wasn't necessarily just to make myself better. It was also to make other people better and I think those are the kinds of questions that seem to segment pretty well.
Well that feedback because I think we all get stuck in those thought Spirals and again not to demonize smartphones because they are wonderful tools, but I have to remember the time. I'm 48 years old.
As of tomorrow and I have to remember a time in which negative stuff was probably happening in the background, but I didn't hear about it because no one was texting it to me. So I'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 nowadays you can get a positive text message that says, okay. It wasn't so bad or something like that. But I do think as probably becoming a parent about these
Also communication are are either Boons or disruptions to our positive psychology is clear that we're just like being bombarded all the time. So just as a practical question, what is your relationship to your phone? Do you set boundaries around your phone use where the types of communications and activities that you engage it on your phone. I
do so everybody I think everyone I know has a to-do list. I also have it to don't list.
And on my to don't list includes I don't scroll on social media and I don't pick up my phone past 9 p.m. And those those two habits are enormously helpful. Particularly the not scrolling I pick up my phone when I have something to post or when I want to see what the comments are and then see if there's something interesting to learn or somebody that I want to respond to and that that becomes a really healthy boundary because I don't get stuck in one of these rabbit holes where all of a sudden two hours have gone by and I
Like I feel like I wasted my time,
but where do you post or keep your to do in your to-don't list? Do you keep them on your phone
now? It's a Word document on my computer. Okay,
so you're still at the computer screen quite a bit each
day. Yeah. Okay. I feel like that's where most of my good thinking and writing happens.
Yeah. I carry a small notebook around with me now and write things down. I was just curious one of these. Yeah. Well like one of those yeah
not to take notes on my phone ever,
right?
Yeah, it can be problematic for me, especially with with voice recognition now because you just it's hard to go back to that and then systematically for me but I'm a big believer in these these things that were for those listening and not watch I'm holding up a pen. So should I punch holes work to you've
and probably read some of the research also showing that you have a better memory for information when you take notes by hand then by
keyboard. I didn't know that but I'm very very gratified to hear that so the and I suppose if you don't have a pen and you don't have a pencil handy.
Then you know blood always works. Just kidding. I'm just kidding. Don't don't don't don't make yourself or anyone else bleed just to get an idea down but it is amazing how sometimes we will have ideas while running walking showering out and about and then later try and recall those ideas and it will write them down. They're gone the great Joe Strummer from The Clash talked about the critical importance of carrying around a small notebook such as you did because he said that the ideas Fall Down Like Rain and if you catch them they're there, but if you miss them, they truly won't be there later and that's there's something kind of eerie about
Bout that like why wouldn't we be able to remember these potential gems of ideas? All right. The guys are in up of the mind. We had a guest on this podcast for a series. Dr. Paul Conti psychiatrist, and he talked extensively about the unconscious mind. I mentioned this a little earlier but one of the things that really stuck with me is he said, you know, everyone thinks that the prefrontal cortex and the frontal cortex is the supercomputer of the human brain sets context planning strategy switching.
Etc certainly if it's valuable real estate to our intellect and all our abilities, but he said, you know, 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 defenses. So our so-called blind spots projection projective identification, you know, I mean these have these can be both good or bad they can serve us well or poorly and so on and so forth, but
Implied in this notion of the unconscious and blind spots is that we can't become aware of things unless we either do dedicated work to become aware of them or even better would be dedicated work where we are asking other people to say, Hey, listen, you have a blind spot and it is blank blank and blank. So tell us about the role of blind spots maybe even some positive aspects of having blind spots, but more importantly what we can do to fill in those blind spots and and
Perhaps also explain how they can limit us and if you have any examples that from the research where people overcoming their blind spots has benefited them. That would be
amazing. Yeah. Wow, there's a lot there. Let me let me start by saying I think a lot of people think about blind spots in terms of heuristics and biases so you think about confirmation bias you think about the classic condiment reverse key work that ended up winning Danny and Nobel prize on The the way in which we are in
intuitive judgments often get anchored in the way we've done things before or you know, we focus on the information that Stallion and available to us and overlooked less obvious information. I've come to think that the mother of all biases is what I think of as the I'm not biased bias. It's technically called the bias blind spot in Emily prone and colleagues research, but the idea is that I think I'm more objective than other people and you may have your you may have flaws in your thinking Andrew, but me
I see things clearly and rationally and I think that this is a it's a really dangerous meta bias because the moment you believe you're not biased you are incapable of seeing any of your biases. So in some of the research on the bias blind spot, you see that that people who have who score high in cognitive ability test so high IQ are actually more likely to fall victim to the I'm not bias bias because they've been reinforced for a lifetime that they're really smart.
Art and they're good at thinking
goodness. This explains some we don't talk about current events on this podcast much. But this explain some current events people that were told their entire careers that they are perfect or near perfect and circumstances eventually came to slam them hard into the concrete on that one
or or in some cases. It hasn't happened yet, but we watch them hurtling toward Earth, so I worry a lot about that. So I think the beginning of you know of
In any blind spot is recognizing that we all have blind spots is part of Being Human. I think that the brighter side of that is that we're not just blind to weaknesses. We're also blind to our strengths so Jan Dutton and Laura Morgan Roberts and colleagues did some research on the reflected best self portrait. This is one of my favorite exercises to do in the classroom, but also to do and work places sometimes even people end up doing it with their kids at home. The idea is that you do have strengths that you're not that aware of they may be things that come naturally.
Really to you that you don't even realize are hard for other people. They may be things that our struggles for you. And so you think it's hard to do and therefore I'm bad at it but other people watch you do it and realize you're actually quite good at it. So the you need other people to hold up a mirror to see what these invisible strengths are. So the way the reflected best self Exercise Works is you're asked to contact 10 to 20 people who know you well in different walks of life might be a family member a couple friends colleagues and then you ask them to tell a story about a time when you were
Best and you collect these stories. It's it's the most exciting week of email. You will ever get 20 notes. Let me tell you how great you are but what's key this goes back to our discussion of feedback earlier. Is there 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 a really powerful and Vivid way of getting a sense of what are those strengths and you know it
Not surprising that in some of the research when people go through this process they end up with much more clarity. Not only about what they're what they're good at and where their potential lies. But also, how do I what are those situations have in common where I was able to use my strengths and how do I get myself in those situations? Where often how do I create those situations more often? I'll give you a personal example on this. So I got a bunch of feedback that I was good at helping other people see their strengths and I thought okay.
Don't feel like I have enough opportunities to use that strength in my daily life. So what am I going to do about this and I ended up flipping the exercise upside down and I picked 100 people who really mattered to me and I wrote a story to each of them about a time when they were at their best.
And there's there's no reason I can't I can't make this part of my day is probably it was it was probably one of the best weeks of my life. It was better than getting the stories was was giving them and I got these notes back from people saying, you know, I didn't realize I don't even remember that thing that happens but I think for me it was 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 a first year doctoral student, I didn't feel like I had anything to contribute to others. I'm trying I'm trying to learn how to you know, understand this field and you know do a worthwhile studying write a paper. I'm not teaching yet. I have no value to add and getting this feedback like, oh, you're somebody who helps other people see their potential. All right. Let me let me take some people that I you know, I already recognized really amazing things in and let me just tell them that and it took me about a week to write the the huh
Demos, and I can't think of the week I've spent better.
It's so interesting that you flipped the process on its head a bit or a lot and that ended up being the reward. Do you think you learned anything about given that it was early in your academic career? Do you think you learned anything about your particular Talent OR desire to do what you do now. I mean, it's so much of what you described is seems to map well to what you
Now, I mean you could be if you were to choose or chosen just not just but a laboratory scientist doing experiments, you're clearly still doing that at a with tremendous productivity. But you've also decide to tell the world about the information that you're Gathering and the work of a lot of other people as well. I guess I feel a kinship here because we both do this
much much more interesting to decide other people's work the talk about what you already know,
it is indeed and it's fun to be able to weave ones.
Understanding of the process into you know, 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 Maps pretty well on to what you just
described. I don't think it was it wasn't crystallized at the time, but it was definitely one of those seeds that was planted that must have grown because
I remember right after I got tenure a wonderful colleague of mine asked if I would write a book with him and I was so flattered and I went in to talk to my undergrad research lab later that day and I mentioned offhand. Hey and I got this invite. I'm going to write this book and they freaked out. No, you cannot write somebody else's book. You have to write about your ideas first. If you're going to write a book write your own book, and I was very resistant because I
Other people's ideas. No, I would I feel like what I do best. I think it was a boy who wrote about the scholarship of Discovery versus the scholarship of integration and I never felt like I was a Eureka, you know, blindingly, you know original Insight person. I felt like what I was good at was synthesizing ideas and you know kind of taking a bunch of pieces of cloth and sewing them into a quilt and allowing people to see the big picture.
In a way, they hadn't before and I felt like I could do that with a colleague who was already a successful author and my students basically held me hostage and they 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 dots that connected there.
When I was a master student at Berkeley, there was a guy who's now moved to Michigan State Mark Breedlove who I hope to host on the podcast actually. It's this really interesting is really interesting work on the biology of sexual differentiation.
And I think that's an invite if you're
listening. Yeah, right and he it is indeed and he said to me he said, you know review articles provided they are written by people who are credentialed in a given field are sited at you know,
100x any one particular paper now at the time I wasn't interested in Impact factors. In fact, I've never paid any attention impact factors. They've their importance varies and in different countries and in the u.s. They put play some role more. So in Europe, but I could care less about impact factor frankly because those metrics are what it's going to carry you through the difficulty of Designing and carrying out a hard experiment. You have to be intrinsically in curious about the answer right? You know this and I know
No this but but he basically said what something that's really supports your point, which is that ultimately the ability to synthesize information is can feel really good and he was start talking about that the feeling that he got from doing that. He's also a tremendous bench 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 realize now that much of what you do is to help people identify an
Their blind spots by and I love your social media channels and I noted on Instagram and I do scroll but I scroll through and to your channel to you'll put up in short form content that that really highlights the key importance of people embarking on strategies that they wouldn't reflexively take that I see that over and over again. It's like we think that the best leaders do blank but actually the research says they do exactly the opposite and you
you have a vast kit of those so along those lines, you know, what are some of the most common blind spots that you observe and that people could benefit from understanding and doing contrary action around as it relates to let's say interpersonal relations in the workplace or at home and and maybe we could see this with finding that you've also written about which is that, you know people who have and exert of a lot of proficiency and
In 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 weave that in with blind
spots. Yeah, we can so I think that so one of the things I found over the past few years is that and this is inspired by a Phil tetlock framework a lot of us spend a lot of our time thinking like preachers.
Secures our politicians
preachers prosecutors politicians
that so you think about these as three mental modes that even if you've never worked in any of these careers, you you will watch your thinking colored by at least one of them more often than you would like. So in preacher mode, you're basically proselytizing your own views and you I mean Andrew Yura in some in some situations. I think of you as a highly effective professional debunker of preachers of you know, certain kinds of snake oil when it comes to health
And you know and biology sometimes you take that too far and people might accuse you of being a prosecutor where you're attacking other people's views and then the third mode politician mode is basically you don't even bother to listen to people unless they already agree with your views. What I think is interesting is these modes of thinking our adaptive for in certain roles. So preachers make great salespeople. They're often Visionary leaders prosecutors are often highly effective.
Scientists, right we excel at criticizing other people's work and finding what's wrong with it politicians are great at 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 beliefs. So my I'll tell you my biggest advice is prosecutor mode. I've been called a logic bully. My wife had to explain to me. That was not a compliment.
Oh my goodness.
I know. I know you've experienced this too.
If I feel confident that there's strong evidence that somebody is wrong. I believe it's my moral responsibility to correct them. And that never goes well
amazing. I won't reflect on my own experience. I'll just say yes. And yes, right right that the logic word ninja mode is one that I think we're trained in as academics. We are in that and you know, or if you're a lawyer or you know, or
Many other professions as well and I think it holds value and it can be very effective in certain domains but less effective in other
domains. Yes, and I think part of the problem is you know, when I actually whether you're preaching Prosecuting or politicking assume are politicking, you look like you're not open because you've already in all cases you think you're right and other people are wrong. And so that makes it really hard for other people to reason with you to disagree thoughtfully with you. So my favorite alternative and 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 as you model, so effectively a good scientist has the humility to know what they don't know and the Curiosity to constantly seek out new knowledge there have been multiple experiments showing that when people are taught to think like scientists their judgment improves and so did their decisions and I think a lot of that stems from when when you go into
Scientists mode you realize that all of your opinions are just hypotheses 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 meta message that I'm trying to communicate to people with my work is assumptions are meant to be pressure tested. They're meant to be questioned and
And if you're not open to rethinking your views, then you basically turned thinking into a religion and I don't know about you, but I prefer to be a spy for you son. I'm good data as opposed to Blind Faith and I think that's been a huge part of your contribution in the last three or so years to public discourses. You've helped people think more scientifically and talk more scientifically about their daily habits and behaviors and I guess my my big question is how do we help people do that more often even in Nome?
Maine's where they don't have access to scientific knowledge and they don't read journals
purse. Well, thanks for the kind words of feedback. I think my goal is always to you know, identify who's coming the podcast for health tools and protocols and hopefully teach them some science and scientific thinking and for those that are coming to the podcast for Science and scientific thinking hopefully they get some health tools and protocols also, but because I fell in love with science for the exact reason that you're describing which is that I lived I grew up in a family that was very divided politically along.
slides along essentially every line of like what foods to eat what was healthy what wasn't and the only way I could reconcile these very frankly polarized views was to you know, embark on the scientific method pose a hypothesis and then try and disprove one's hypothesis and some things get through the filter and it's a constant learning so I should just ask when you teach people how to be a scientist in order to try and overcome some of their blind spots and be better thinkers better meaning
it serves themselves and the people around them better. Is that teaching them? What a hypothesis is that Abbas hypothesis is not a question. It's sort of a your wager on an idea with the understanding that you very well could be wrong and then you try and disprove that idea is that that sort of the Crux of what in these experiments is you're describing is teaching people how to be scientists. Like if they just do that then they'll they're going to
benefit. I think that's that's at the very heart of the lens is
I want to just double-click on the idea of disproving your hypothesis might because most people live in a Land of confirmation bias where they're basically just looking for support for their pre-existing
beliefs. That's right there. Click foraging we all do this, by the way. I'm not criticizing here. We all will have an idea and then we will click forage online to support the idea that
We disagree with them. They disagree with us. Ah, here's somebody I did agree with and that agrees with me, I think and do you think this has roots in our you know in the neural Circuit underpinnings of of just wanting to have affiliation that affiliation feels good. Yeah having people that are like us knowing that we're kind of protected in that.
Yeah. I think that's a big part of it. I think one of the reasons that we encase ourselves an echo Chambers and hide and filtered.
This is there's a strong evolutionary pressure to avoid social exclusion. And so, you know, it's not it's not just that, you know being drawn to affiliation. It's also I really want I'm afraid of being excommunicated from my group and if I challenge the Orthodoxy of the community that I belong to I might be an outcast and I don't think I don't think everyday people think through that logic, but I think there's a there's a deep-seated visceral tendency to avoid that and you know, I think
The when we think about teaching people to see their blind spots more clearly. A lot of that is recognizing it's hard to do that on your own because by definition your blind spots are invisible to you. And so this is why other people's input is so important and I think you know, I'm 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
Process those are the people who really stretch your thinking and I think that's what we were trained to do. It's what I was trying to do is a social science social scientist is to listen to the ideas that made me think hard not just the ones that made me feel good and to surround myself with people who challenged my thought process not just the ones who validated my conclusions and I think you know, a lot of people here that message and I know but I don't want to let that like that awful perspective into my world like know you want to be more nuanced in saying who are the people where before I knew what their
Answer was I would be impressed with the depth and the thoroughness of their reflection and their analysis. I should be following those people and learning from them regardless of the hypotheses that they generate and the results that they share.
I'm so glad that you mentioned the importance of following people that you disagree with. I think one thing that we have to highlight and I'm hoping we'll maybe even emerge from this conversation is that follows are not endorse.
It's and this is actually a real problem. I mean there are academics who have lost their jobs not necessarily for following certain accounts, but for commenting on certain common threads maybe even a like is a slightly different category because it's as the name suggests. It's a like it's it sounds like and it's in thought of as a vote of approval of what's there? Yeah, but when one's options are just you know, a heart follow or no heart no follow, you know, I was a big fan of the thumbs-up thumbs-down. I gotta like that.
Alms up thumbs down because at least you have that you have an option to dissent without getting into online comment battles and things of that sort. But listen, I've had 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 presumably in the algorithm raising prominence to a channel. Yeah, but I'm right there with you. I follow lots of accounts of people who I fundamentally disagree with but I'm trying to learn and I'm also trying
Understand what their capture points are like why people find them so intriguing. Yes. Anyway, I'm a learner. I'm a forager like you so I I'm in
the same boat and every once in a while, I think like it. It's stunning to me. I don't know if you've ever looked at your your Instagram statistics, but somebody call you mine actually showed me as I didn't realize you could look at the effect of each post follows a nun follows. I didn't realize that and you know,
No, the I think it might typical ratio might be two or three two one for a post. So, you know gaining two or three to four two or three followers everyone that I lose the idea that I could post anything that would cause someone to unfollow me like if I said something interesting enough that you thought I was worth following. How could how could one post change your mind about that? I think you're too focused on what I think and maybe not paying attention to how I think was my first reaction to that and then my second is 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 strikes them wrong and they think this person is not credible or they think that this person has, you know, lost sight of you know of what rigorous science is. I wonder if you've had that experience to of I think I made the mistake of taking for granted that
Anybody who followed me knows that if I post something I think it's worth thinking about and you know, it's been carefully studied and I didn't have a I didn't have a dog in the fight. I read this research and said this cleared the bar not only of an academic Journal but I read the methods and I found them sound enough that we ought to be discussing this idea. Have you had that experience too?
I certainly have and I should say that, you know, I was weaned in an academic culture three separate mentors very different styles all of them.
We're excellent mentors, but all of whom taught me that you know, there are phenomenal papers where they're every bit of information in the paper and indeed how it's written from start to finish is just watertight and incredible and there are other papers that are less water tight. But occasionally there will be papers where one data point in a figure is intriguing enough to consider following that scent Trail in your own work.
even if the rest of the paper is kind of a
I mean one data point now that doesn't mean taking one data point in casting it out to millions of people on social media as an actionable item is valid. That's certainly not what I'm saying, but what I do realize and I'm realizing again now it after what you just said is that indeed people don't know the context in which like what like what filters are we working with before we bring things forward and I think that you know, my belief is that if it's grounded firmly in the scientific method that that's the best
Starting place we're talking about that earlier and I also understand that scientists differ tremendously in how they look at even the same data in the same paper. So there is no governing body that says, okay this paper means blank the authors have their interpretation the students have their interpretation. In fact the course I used to teach undergraduates which grew into a very large course we would learn to ask for questions. What's the question that the authors were asking sometimes the sub question what methods did they use? What did they find and then what did they
include and does it relate back to the original question and that simple breaking out a four questions of studies essentially what I do for all studies, but I have my way of doing it and it's going to differ from the way that other people do it social media. I think what's interesting is that I think there's always going to be a core following of a given person like your followers that they're going to trust, you know, not asserted across the board but there's a general acceptance of ideas coming through. I think they don't social media. It's hard to strike a balance between setting
The whole context and the action will take aways I get criticized a lot for not being concise enough and I agree. But but I also get you no matter the size for putting things taking things out of context. Yes, so such a tight rope. Oh, it's a tightrope walk and it's always going to be a tightrope walk. And so I'm going to just you know, keep going and I know you will too and and listen I'm there's there's some kids out there. It's surely not gonna be wearing that are going to take our jobs eventually and and we'll find a way to do it much better. Who knows through aii, right?
Wherever that might be robots. I feel like this is an appropriate place to ask about something else since we're talking about sort of perception of others and gleaning information overcoming blind spots it something that you've written about some years ago. Now I guess would be almost 8 years ago now about authenticity, you know, the word authenticity is such a Minefield the such a Minefield I was going to say such as such a gravitate positive gravitational pull like oh they're really authentic as opposed to what's the opposite of authentic faith.
Right, but I think we could all learn to draw some lines between authenticity and oversharing right? Well, how do we gauge authenticity and we can refer people to that article you wrote some years ago. I think you may have written it differently where to be re-written today. But you talked to Matt article about somebody who essentially decided to tell everyone that he worked with all the things that he was interested in doing with them relating to them and it did not serve him well,
Yes, that's awesome. Right and so then there's this this notion of benevolent deception in order to preserve relationship and importantly it brought about a word that we don't hear about very often but that I rather like which is etiquette 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 start insulting other begin insult me, but if you want to insult other people, I'm not going to tolerate that.
That so that's where I draw the line classroom rules. There's an etiquette and I think that etiquette is important. So how do we balance authenticity with etiquette and also with preserving ones ones public life or private or private life, right authenticity at home seems important. You could be your complete self at home except when you want to you know, physically hit your sister or brother.
Because they ate your ice cream. That's not the right kind of authenticity.
No. No, it isn't. I think well they're I think it's such a rich and complicated topic. I think the first thing is I don't want people to be disingenuous ever, but I have a real problem with people saying as an excuse for a disrespectful Behavior. Well, I was just being myself. I think David Sedaris said yes, but yourself is an asshole.
So good so
good and I think I think what people forget is that we have we all have multiple selves right you I mean, you've known this your whole career. We all have multiple identities. We also could think about yourself as your thoughts your emotions your values your personality. So which facet of yourself you're trying to be true to 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 concretely is, I don't think we should worry about being authentic to what we're thinking and feeling in any given moment. I think what we want to ask is what I'm about to do or say consistent with my principles. And sometimes that means you will be false to your personality in order to be true to your values. Sometimes that means you will you will feel like you're not honoring your thought of your emotion in the
Moment but you're doing that with a broader view toward who is the person that I want to be there was a cultural critic Lionel trilling who wrote about the idea of sincerity as opposed to authenticity and I really like this distinction. He said when when you when you try to think about being authentic, you're trying to bring the inside out and to point entry that's not always appropriate or effective. He said sincerity is a little bit more about bringing the outside in so pay attention to the person you claim to be and then try to become that person.
And those a little bit of an aha moment for me. I realized you know, there are all these people who say well you should you know, you should you should walk your talk.
And I think that's good advice. I might even go a step further and say, you know, maybe you should only talk it if you're already walking.
Maybe maybe that would help us avoid hypocrisy but I think the the fundamental message here is that we all we all could be authentic to one part of ourselves and inauthentic to another part and I think the most important part is to ask what do I stand for? And if I'm what I'm about to communicate is not consistent with that and maybe maybe I could self-censor
such great advice and suppose one has to wonder about the
The role of a emotional states, you know, I think there are career-ending mistakes that people make in a moment, especially online nowadays. And by the way, this is not just for people who are already established in their career. I've heard stories and there seem to be more and more of these in the news of for instance, you know videos of things that people said some years earlier getting them injected from college a guest on Lex Friedman's podcast who works in the Securities World said that one of the lessons
seems that he teaches his kids is to not film themselves doing bad things. But in and of course also not to do bad things but in general to just not film themselves doing anything because of his understanding of the risk of doing that and we don't want to create a paranoia but gosh, I mean who you are when you're 14 is a very different person than who you are when you're 27 and when you're 50 help, so I hope so so, you know, and so
Yeah, I think it you know balancing authenticity across the lifespan and we're expecting young minds to do this and clearly older Minds can't do it either. I mean I this is a pretty well-known case of a chair of a major site the major Psychiatry Department. We won't name the university but basically lost his job for a single tweet. He just was not being thoughtful. In fact, he was being really like numb to other people and lost his job. And and I think
You don't know him and it was obvious why he lost I don't think it was debatable. But gosh you think about somebody who's a chair of Psychiatry which means their psychiatrist which means they're trained to think about thinking and there you go.
It's amazing how common this is and I think one of the things that's fascinating to me is I guess this goes back to something we were talking about a moment ago, but
I think that when we communicate we have access to the sum total of all of our thoughts and everything we've ever ever said that we can remember and we forget that other people only have a snapshot and so one of the questions I like to ask is if this was the only post that somebody saw a mine would I be proud of it? Would it communicate who I am and who I aspire to be so good if the answer is no maybe I should pause before I put that out there
that that is excellent advice.
If it were the only post like your one and only representing you
fantastic now that could be paralyzing. If you're a perfectionist you'll never post but I think for somebody who's posting regularly, it's a good filter to just ask am I am I being thoughtful enough?
So good. I
won't add anything to that just say I'll just say so so good. Let's talk about potential. I was in junior high school and I remember having a social studies teacher who she just would go on and on about potential. She has special program after school. You could get involved potential potential potential and we hear about this, you know, we have untapped potential you here. We're only operating at 40% of our abilities, you know, people will say that the implication is that we have reservations.
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 give a new book on this topic tell us about potential like do we all have huge reservoirs of potential that we are not accessing and of course I and everyone else wants to know how can we access those? But maybe you could also tell some of the myths around potential and tell us about those about potential such a such a sticky toffee.
Topic for all the right
reasons. Thank you. I know it's one of those things where you've had this experience. I'm sure many times where you start thinking and talking about a topic and you realize it's it's been your whole life, but you didn't see it until then and I feel that way about potential. I think that I've been passionate about helping people achieve their potential as long as I can. Remember, I think every girl I've ever set has been about stretching my potential in one way or another or at least realizing it and
Become so struck by as I've studied this topic is we all have hidden potential but we don't know how to unlock it. So why do we often underestimate our own potential? We judge ourselves By Us by our starting abilities and this is more common for people with fixed mindsets, but even people with growth mindsets, you try a new skill. It doesn't go well and you think this is not for me. I'm not cut out for this and then it gets worse when other people also, you know, you're not just under estimating yourself. You're also
So being under met underestimated by others other people watch you and say yeah, you don't have the you know, you're not a prodigy. You're not a natural. You don't have the talent that it takes and I think the big myth there is that raw talent is the most important driver of How High people climb it's not motivation and opportunity matter more than Rob ability for growth
motivation and
opportunity. Yeah, you know, obviously everybody starts at a different point, but how close you come?
Potential is much more about the character skills you cultivate to to improve it improving over time. And then whether you're in a situation where you have access to the knowledge that you need and the tools you need to keep growing. And so yeah a concrete example this for me is when I when I started diving I was way too late I picked it up as a teenager a lot of the elite divers in the world start by five goodness and actually in China there's there.
Handpicked by for body type and sent to a version of diving boarding school where they don't even teach kids how to swim. They tie a rope around them so that they can just pull them back after after they hit the water in the deep
end what part of their body tie rope around.
I think it's their waist.
So they're diving with a rope so that when they get in the water, they're not wasting any energy exactly. You're just being dragged through the water and out.
That's that that's my understanding of it.
Wow, but Brazil, oh I could they have to walk they have to climb. Yeah. Okay, sir.
Other things have to do
happen. The the swimming apparently is very secondary. Anyway, so I started really late and I lacked most of the things that you would want as a diver. I couldn't touch my toes without bending my knees. My teammates called me Frankenstein because I was so stiff when I walked so lacking the flexibility. I have no rhythm my coach brought a metronome to practice one day and I couldn't even keep the beat. So, you know you think about diving is a sport of Grace nope, and
Then I also couldn't jump and I couldn't twist either and it's like you're missing the explosive power. You don't have the athleticism and I think if I had if I had just looked at those abilities and no business being a diver and in fact, no business being an athlete had already been cut from the Middle School basketball team three times. I didn't make the high school soccer team. Those were the two sports. I had poured a decade into this is going nowhere Eric just the most incredible coach I could ever imagine.
He said to me on the first day of practice. He said, you know, yes, you're missing all these things. But I believe if you if you pour yourself into this sport that you could be a state finalist by the time you finish High School.
And he saw more potential in me than I saw in myself and that just lit a fire under me. And you know what that translated into is a lot of the behaviors that that you and I have both studied, you know setting specific difficult goals for I want to learn these Dives that seemed Out Of Reach For You know, I want to increase my score over the next three meats by 10 points for I want to learn how to you know, all my limitations notwithstanding. One thing that I can Master they have total control over is how clean I go into the water.
get a rip entry so that there's no splash and that's the most important part of a dive and one of the greatest compliments ever got as a diver was I came out of a meat in a couple of years and I think I was maybe a junior in high school and one of the judges turn to Eric and said, all he can do is rip and Eric said
so
yes, it's awesome. It's almost like saying all he can do is win the you know,
yeah, it was a great backhanded compliment. But Eric was like listen, he made the dive. It has a degree of difficulty. Maybe he didn't jump as high as you wanted. Maybe his type has talked wasn't as tight as you wanted. But at the end of the day like that dive disappeared straight up and down in the water. You can't not give that a seven and that ended up serving me really well. And so I think the broader lesson here for me was Eric said to me actually last year. I never thought about this he
Ed I never got close to even qualifying for Olympic trials like I did not have the talent to be that good but I got way better than I ever expected and Eric said to me he said looking back. He said you got further with less Talent than everyday any diver I've ever coached and that was so meaningful to me and what it reminded me was my proudest accomplishments were not in the areas where I started out with the most Talent they were in the areas where I had overcome the most obstacles and I think that to me is
really what drives people around potential is to say it's not performance that's motivating. It's a sense of
progress.
I love that story and I couldn't agree more. I mean I think or not is my favorite Topic in Sciences the course I performed at least after my freshman year, which was abysmal least well in the face when I was doing well in the class with it and neural development. I now teach neural development neural development and bad where you at it at first. Okay. Well, I have to put it in context my high school and freshman year of college were abysmal right basically no place being there.
I can only think my high school girlfriend for being so wonderful that I followed her off to college and ended up there left after my freshman year came back. And then at that point it was like a step function. I work out of fear and excitement and love of the material. I was a straight-A student thereafter, but in my senior year senior year, excuse me. I took a course in neural development, which was extremely challenging and I got a B+ and that B+ still gets me, you know, but it's a topic that I love the most it's what I did my
Graduate thesis on to what I teach at Stanford among other topics, and and I like to think now I have I guess humility side considerable Mastery over the material but it's because I didn't do as well as I would have liked and I applied myself so much and I think that it just didn't come naturally to me and then eventually over time you kind of get it or you get you get it so it's it but it's still my favorite topic because it was that friction point right? It's the ratcheting through and there's something I don't know. That's just so
Satisfying to me. I used to watch my Bulldog Mastiff Costello, like chewing on a bone or when he was all on a brick because you know, he had a kind of a Homer Simpson brain about his object choice to chew on and hear it and he just looked like he was in just total Bliss. It was like this effort combined with some intrinsic pleasure of the process. And so I think that when one is ratcheting through something that's hard, it feels so good that it's almost better than the outcome like it is better than the outcome.
I think it is and you know, it's
it's fascinating because this is why I'm always bothered by people saying play to your strengths because if you do that, you would gravitate toward the things that come naturally to you and you're going to miss out on the very often the the skill that was hard for you to learn to your point is one that you end up with greater Mastery over because you had to put in the extra effort and you end up deriving more more satisfaction out of the fact that this was really tough and I figured it out, you know implicit in your story and maybe partially
Illicit and in some parts when I was when I was look at the character skills that help people realize their potential and really fuel unexpected growth ended up finding three that I think are under discussed and and well supported by science. I think that basically if you want to reach your potential or achieve more than you think you're capable of we're looking at becoming a creature of discomfort and embracing things that are unpleasant or awkward for you. I'll be the first
the second is is being a sponge and soaking up new information and also filtering or filtering out what might not be useful and then the third is is being an imperfection assist which is knowing when to aim for excellence and when to settle for good and I hear all of those themes in your story, you know, that was obviously obviously uncomfortable. He like you got a B+ you don't want to do any more neural development like
not at all. It was so frustrating and so exciting to me at the same time and then
When everything I did in the five or seven years that followed was all about learning more about this topic because it wasn't about performing well or proving myself. I just I love the material so much more because of how challenging it was and I'm grateful to you been Reese professor at UC Santa Barbara incredible neuroanatomist and teacher of neural development and and laboratory scientists because you know, I think had I gotten an a I don't know that I would have fallen in love with it in the same way. Isn't that
weird? You wouldn't have had to
I work at it to discover. What was fun about it. I
imagine now absolutely and it's still one of my favorite topics to teach and learn about so you mentioned discomfort being a sponge / filter if I got that right an imperfection assist. Yeah. Tell me more about the imperfection estate piece because I feel like I've had students in my lab and I've known people in other domains of life that they're they're absolutely paranoid about shipping something out for the world to see it and of
Like no one wants to put stuff out into the world. That isn't right and God forbid 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 extreme perfectionist. Like how do they ever do anything and now are they happy people because I can't imagine that they are.
No, I mean this isn't so Thomas current. I think it's the world's leaders leading psychologist studying perfectionism. And if you look at his meta-analyses perfectionism
Um is a recipe for Burnout and depression and anxiety because you're constantly comparing yourself to an ideal. That's unachievable perfectionist are not they do get better grades in school slightly, but they don't do any better at work than their peers 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+ whereas at work performance is much more nebulous. And so what happens to perfectionist a lot of times is they end up
Optimizing the things that are predictable and controllable and then, you know sort of missing the forest and the trees and I think the you know, the the antidotes as far as I know really have to do with calibration. So, you know, I talked earlier about how I like to ask for a 0 to 10 to find out, you know, am I in the ballpark or not? Well, one of my biggest liabilities is a diver was I was never satisfied with my score and one day Eric said to me, you know, you hear Olympic judges talk about your commentators talk about the perfect.
10 that's a misnomer. If you look at the diving rulebook attendance for excellence, not for Perfection. There's no such thing as a Flawless dive. I can look at Dives have gotten straight tens and point out 19 things that were wrong with them, but they were excellent. And so then we had to define the standards of excellence. So what I have as a recovering perfectionist somebody who you know just beat myself up constantly fact I got we did paper plate Awards on my swim team and one year. I was given the if only award and there's a little cartoon.
And it says if only I had pointed my left pinky toe. I would have gotten an eight and a half instead of an 8 and that is the story of my diving career and I did not want to be that person anymore. And so one of the things I've learned to do is to when I start anything, you know, if I sit down to write a book, I'm aiming for a 9 and the reason for that is I'm going to pour a couple years of my work life into this topic, you know, hopefully a lot of people are going to read it and I want to make sure it's truly the best work I can produce.
Deuce social media posts. I'm okay with a seven if I'm always shooting for a 90. I'm not gonna post very often
because you're not on your ceiling for 90's or your threshold for nine is so exceeding is
hi-yah and I wanted to keep getting higher over time. So my idea of a nine today is much more challenging than it was 10 years ago. And I think this is this is what people probably don't do enough, especially if you're an extreme perfectionist is they don't realize okay. Let me let me figure out how important this task is.
And then for this task a six is sufficient so that then I can pour my energy into pulling the the seven-and-a-half toward a nine where it really matters and inevitably if you don't do that, what you will do is you will get a bunch of nines things that are completely
trivial. I went to a high school where we had a couple kids get perfect on the SAT. They would have a big like centerfold list of all the early admissions to all the fancy Ivy League schools are definitely was not on that list. I don't even know if I
Yeah, I don't even know if I was anywhere near that list. Probably not and some of them have gone on to have terrific lives and seem pretty happy and I know a number of them and in contact with them and I think for some of them that performed exceedingly well on standardized tests early on I hear a bit more dismay in their in their current life. Not all but it is there I have to imagine there are data on the server early. Hi.
Performance being a seed for challenges later on. Obviously, you don't want the the opposite the sort of what I guess they refer to now so, you know complete Failure to Launch, you know, people not meeting that the Milestone towards being self-sufficient adults. But yeah, what are some of the dangers of success when thinking about realizing one's larger
potential that's such an interesting question, I think.
Yeah, I think the data on this go both ways. So, you know some early success is you know, it's a motivator it builds the kind of momentum you were talking about earlier. There's a goal-setting researchers like Locke and Latham have talked about the High Performance Cycle where you hit a goal and then that builds your confidence and then you said a more ambitious goal and then you reach it and there's this upward spiral over time, but there's also a mountain of evidence that achieving your goals can make you complacent and there's a
Sometimes it's called The Fat Cat syndrome where you end up resting on your laurels and then they're also competency traps where you get good at something and then you keep doing it the way you've always done it and you don't realize the world is changed around you like I'm allergic to the idea of best practices the moment you call it practice best. You've created an illusion that you're done and the moment like think about pre covid 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's
King remotely and they've got to throw that out the window and look for better practices for an evolved world. So I think those are the things I worry about most with early success. I think that one of the things I would love to see more people do when it comes to reaching potential is is to figure out what is my failure budget look like so time I experienced on this it started.
I wrote her first book gave a TED Talk and pretty soon felt like I was spending eighty percent of my time saying things I already knew and I was getting Typecast like I'm not learning and growing but I'm also not I don't feel like I'm contributing new knowledge to the world. What am I going to do about that and 2018 rolls around I'm like, you know it this I'm gonna start a podcast and that will be my you know, my learning mechanism and I didn't know if it was going to work. I didn't know how the medium would work for me. I didn't know if people were going to want to
listen to my voice. I certainly don't maybe Morgan Freeman likes the sound of his own voice. I'll just I like listen to your podcast. Thank you, sir. I also enjoy listening to yours, but I think everybody hates the sound of their voice. I just I just wasn't sure for a lot of reasons whether it was going to work and then I thought about it and I realized well all of the 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 that's reflecting on goal setting researchers. As one does realized, you know, like the confidence is going to come through doing it. And so let me try it and I guess what I took away was if I don't if I never fail it means I'm not challenging myself. I'm not embracing discomfort. I'm not being enough of an imperfection assist. So I said actually
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 creating an acceptable zone of failure to know that that's going to motivate some risk taking and some experimentation and hopefully some growth and I know it's hard for a lot of people to do this in their lives, especially if you have a you know, it's super demanding boss, but I think we're all better off from a a growth and potential standpoint if we've got, you know, if you if you succeed on 90% of your projects, that should be a hugely successful year.
If you succeed on 100% I think you're aiming too low.
What are some of the projects that you are currently spending in the back of your mind that would be fun. But if you're willing to share yeah that for you still strike a little bit of an anxiety cord like, oh no, like are you I don't know. Are you a musician do not at all? All right. Are you guys here? Okay, thank you. Are you thinking about becoming a musician or exploring playing music or what how the
And I
ask it that way is how far into your discomfort Zone do you reach in order to in order to challenge yourself? Because I think that what everyone needs to have thresholds. Like there are a lot of things that I wish I could play a musical instrument frankly, but I'm not that motivated to do it mostly because I enjoy hearing other people play music so much that I'm perfectly happy. I'm
sated. Yeah, there's also enough good music out there. You have to create
there's definitely a lot of great music.
Yeah. So I think there's a there's a micro and macro version of this. So on the
Side and then past year I did this work like podcast for 5 years where I was taking the core of my organizational psychology work and trying to take on a topic and make it interesting and useful to people and then realizing I was feeling constrained just to focus on work and as a psychologist, there's lots of other things I want to take on and so we expanded into second show rethinking and I have some experiments. I'm tempted to try but I've been really hesitant to do them. So did you watch wrestling growing up ever professional
Rusty?
I did watch a little bit of it. And then for whatever reason in the last year my good friend Rick Rubin, who's he's not obsessed, but he is a real devotees a fan of professional wrestling. He had me watch some WWE but even a ew, he was explaining that it's basically physical drama is explaining why it's so intriguing to him and so informative to him and then I'm a big fan of certain genre music and Lars frederiksen from rancid is a huge
Huge wrestling fan. So now got multiple people that have come into contact with her like telling me all this stuff about wrestling. So wrestling seems to be cropping up more and more.
All right, so I don't know the first thing about wrestling. I think I caught it a few times kid
likewise. It was a Hulk Hogan and a few others passed the
classroom. And yeah, but the thing that I remember was loving the tag team matches where you know, somebody would get overpowered and then they pull in somebody to help I could be so interesting if there was a podcast where you take issues that people fundamentally disagree on and
Start a debate and then somebody can tagged in if they want to challenge an argument. And so instead of constant concentrating on the particular guests. You have you basically have a problem you're trying to you know, to get to the roots of and you're gonna have all these people jump in and hopefully build toward a more insightful perspective on it. No idea if this is gonna work, I'd really love to try it. And this is the first time I've spoken out loud about it because like I don't know that I want it like that. I want to see that crash and burn and yet why not?
Like what's the
risk think it's so cool and fun, right? Yeah. What what topics are are are you thinking about covering? Because I can think of some pretty pretty controversial topics, but I want to know what the ones you're thinking
about. Well, I mean, I literally just I mean I'm thinking out loud here but one one that I think on the controversial front, that would be could be really rich is to think about policies for Trans athletes and sports.
That's a controversial topic
controversial. But also I've talked to some experts on this I have talked to some
Fleets in the people who are deep in this do not know what they think the policies should be. And so I think actually hearing them talk and you know, understanding the complexity of those issues and then maybe hammering out what's a policy would propose for schools. What would you want for you know for Olympic events? I just think that would be fascinating and I'd love to I'd love to moderate that discussion
goodness. I mean, I wouldn't
I wouldn't like I don't wanna bite into
that one. Glad you would I wouldn't that seems like one of the most barbaric
Dwyer topics one could ever embarked on which is exactly why I'm going to put in my vote you absolutely should do this podcast. I think it's an amazing idea actually folks put in the comment section on YouTube whether or not Adam should do this podcast and that topic in particular. I think it would be amazing because one thing that keep coming back to in my own mind is that a lot of the controversies out there stem from the fact that we very often have individuals pitted against individuals and their
So much lost in that and I think about science and going back to the scientific method where we have subfields pitted against subfields when you talk about a field like there was a huge controversy over the structure of DNA and it wasn't one individual against another what you had small groups different camps and there was some partial overlap. There's also, you know, if you read the double helix, there was also a lot of behavior. Yeah people people entering romantic relationships just to glean information from the other side, you know, human
beings not at not at their finest, but in any event small panels arguing competing teams competing I think is far more interesting and informative than individuals, you know butting
heads I think so too and I think you know another another one that I think would be really interesting. I mean, I'm like people always say great minds think alike. No great minds challenge each other to think differently, and we just don't do enough of that. So I've been thinking a lot
Politically what if we brought together a bunch of people who are not ideologues but are really interested in pragmatic policy solutions to rewrite the Constitution. If we were going to build one today,
you'd like to tackle big stuff. I just know I love it. I love it. It's a compliment. It's a compact. No. No, I mean what are the odds? Like I said earlier no weak sauce. No weak sauce. Like you just said you're you go right for it. I mean these listen these are the issues that people are really activated by
why because these are really core issues. They get down to the autonomic nervous system there in the hypothalamus as we say, but I don't think they should be like I look at these
topics and think I just want to get it right. I don't have a vested interest in what the model should be. I just know that even the wisest people of 250 years ago were not prepared to anticipate the world. We live in today and we ought to be constantly. I don't know. I don't think you should live in a world where you affirm your beliefs. I think the only way you learn is by continually.
Finger beliefs and so I guess I'm trying to figure out more ways to catalyze that around issues people care about but I don't care about the issues. I care about the stretching of thinking and the improving the way that the world works.
I'll tell you if you decide to do this podcast with the tag team format. I love that you gleaned it from watching wrestling couple of times around these very controversial issues. I promise you that will be one of the most popular and important podcasts on the planet Earth might be podcast on other planets. I here
That they're you know, galaxies far far away with a they may have podcast too may have had of them for much longer than we have but that's that's a winner.
Well, maybe it maybe I'll try it as a little experiment on the rethinking feed and see if it's an unmitigated disaster.
Well, you know where my vote lies. I appreciate that. So, okay. So to go back to your question for a second on the macro side. I've always thought it would be fun to try to write a Sci-Fi novel and the question I'm wrestling with right now. Is that a good use of my time? They're great SciFi writers out there. There aren't that many social scientists communicating about the topics that I do and it feels like it might be I don't know like this might be too much of a diversion.
Hmm then again,
According to your words you had no talent in diving but you exceed it all all performance metrics by considerable amount through motivation and and opportunity. All right, though, right? I vote Yes. I'm not I haven't read much sci-fi. Maybe I need to read read more sci-fi. Are you a fan of sci-fi?
I love sci-fi. It's it's one of my favorite ways to imagine a better world and also prevent a worse one.
From emerging but I don't know there's a there's a part of me that thinks. All right, there's a root Bernstein in colleagues. Did this to know this research on Nobel prize-winning scientists and what differentiates them from their
peers? No, but being the son of a physicist and having been surrounded by just by circumstance number of Nobel Prize winners when I was a kid young kid. I'm very curious to know what the This research says.
I mean there there are many themes you could glean from it, but the thing that
Really jumped out at me is the Nobel Prize winners are more likely to have artistic Hobbies.
Hmm Fineman certainly did.
Yep that mean there's a long list of them. But if you break it down in the data, it was there twice as likely as their peers to play a musical instrument. There are seven times as likely to draw a pain. There are 12 times as likely to do poetry or fiction creative writing and get this 22 times as likely as their peers 22 to dance act or yes perform as magician.
Well farmer magician has very excited by this right? Yeah. Well, I wasn't going to ask
about magic but let's talk about it. I was on vacation with every year I take my sister in New York for her birthday my birthday because our birthdays are close together and we went and saw a magician Mentalist by the name of icy wind Ozzie. I think is the correct pronunciation who just just like the last time I saw him absolutely blew my mind, I'd there's no way it's not magic. Of course. I know it's not magic, but it's
But my understanding is that there are some things that he and other great mentalism magicians do where they are not absolutely certain of the outcome. They're playing its probabilistic. And so there's a risk in a thrill for them to and that they're also creating memories and erasing memories and that's something that we I'm a host asean the podcast because I have any fun. He's very effective at creating memories and erasing memories. That's a lot of what he does and he has tactics to do that in any of that. I wasn't going to ask about me.
Magic, but I know that you were a professional magician at one point in your life and that you did this person because you enjoy doing it but getting beyond the the sort of pull the rabbit out of the hat or pick your identify the card that the person picked out of the the shuffled stack. What is it? And what was it about magic that intrigues you it does it inform him anything about the work that you do
now it does yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I think it when I started I was 12 and I was just it was just fun and I was looking for a way to
Entertain other people and entertain myself in the process and then, you know became a challenge. Can I learn this new scale? And can I master this trick? I think nerdiest thing I did in college was I started a magic club David Quang who is a stellar magician and creusa verbalist as he calls it creusa verbalist. He does magic crossword puzzles. Essentially that I can't do it justice. You have to see it. It's unreal and I watched 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. He's outstanding. Anyway, the way it figures in my work now is I think so much of good science communication as misdirection and it's the same skill. I used 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 actually
I so many of my posts you flagged this earlier. So many of my post start with you know, this thing is not what you think. It's actually this other thing. I think that you know, challenging conventional wisdom questioning assumptions is is what surprises people and then leads them to think either. I have something to learn or Oh, no, I got to put up a shield because my beliefs are being challenged or attacked and I think the art form of magic was always about creating a surprise that would Delight people as opposed to Leading people to feel like they were
Tricked or duped or manipulated? And so I think the the challenge for me is to say Okay. I want to figure out what what do we know from Behavioral Science, you know mostly focusing on psychology because that's my core expertise. What do we know that's actually different from most intuition. And then how do I explain that in a way that surprises people but leads them to say, oh, that's so interesting as opposed to that's wrong and then want to fight about it.
So almost as if you give them the experience
Of what you're trying to teach them so that the oh that's wrong. Can't be the available response to be because in Magic it, you know, it's it's everyone knows it's magic just like with professional wrestling 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 professional wrestling for those that are extreme fans of professional wrestling is that they almost
To wonder about whether or not some of it is not in the plan like that. It's a suspension of reality that they seem to enjoy right because if you know something's fake or well we should at we should be I should be more careful about my language in with magic like when I went to see ah see, I mean, I don't think it's actual magic but he's able to give the illusion of Magic the real illusion is that it's magic right? It's not the illusion of making the card hop to somewhere else in the room.
And he is phenomenal and I highly recommend people go see his show if they get the opportunity, but the I think they're doing a documentary about him now. Actually, they'll be in some Netflix stuff as well. But it's the illusion that magic exists That's so exciting. So with science communication. Yeah. I always aim for four things. I don't always achieve them, but and I think you do as well if I made that topic be interesting clear ideally actionable, but not
Voice and the quad factor is when it's also surprising so interest in clear action Rule and surprising sort of is the ultimate if there's sort of a like, oh, I didn't realize that but it's hard to find data points that
satisfy all four criteria and the surprising is the least important by far. I assume table Stakes is its
rigorous. Oh well, okay sitting underneath all four of those points are that it's science that it's actual science, right? So in didn't just say it's right. It's not conjecture or Theory so that
That means that there's data to support it and that the data were collected with with the appropriate amount of rigor. Right? So there's a there's a reservoir stuff that sits underneath as a
foundation. So give it given the the Baseline of rigor. How do I find what's interesting clear actionable and hopefully surprising although I would okay. I would make a case. There's a classic article that Marie Davis wrote one of my all-time favorites is a sociologist who wrote a paper called that's interesting and he opened the paper by saying ideas live not because they're true but because they're interesting.
Which decimated one of my core beliefs I thought it was accuracy that drove people's beliefs and he said no ideas lived because they're interesting and then he goes to build an index of the interesting to explain when people are intrigued and his case is that most of interest is 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 versa. You can argue that something you think.
Was homogeneous is actually heterogeneous You could argue that something you thought was individual was actually a collective phenomenon or vice versa and he's got this wonderful breakdown of all the ways of being interesting and he's the one who 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's View and I think he's right a huge amount of interest is surprised and so but I don't think it's the only driver of Interest so I might I might take your criteria and say okay we start with rigor.
Are 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 interest and surprise might be it might have the biggest beta wait in the regression equation. But what else what else drives interest? I have a couple hypotheses. I want to hear yours. You've been doing this actively and highly effective lie Beyond surprised what else interests people in your content
anything that draws on self-reflection for them, but I think we all have in it.
Innate 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 domains like some and and cast understanding on our experiences of others to like. Oh now it makes sense like a I'm going back to the the Conte episodes, but we did several of them. So for I think it's appropriate, you know to learn from him that narcissism is Envy. It represents a a extreme deficiency in the pleasure that people are sis can
Have an extreme pleasure drive but they always feel like they have far less than they would like to have in that others have far more of it because they don't have that same yearning for it. Right? And so that narcissism at its core is deep envy that to me was like, wow, you know and to realize that into Now understand that all this discussion that you hear out there about narcissus everyone calling other people narcissus that there are genuine narcissus out there and what they really suffer from is an extreme deficit in pleasure, and they're constantly
Envious of others it reframed everything. I thought about narcissists about them being overbearing which they can be and often are etc. Etc. So I think it's also anything that leads to like. Oh I can I can I can navigate narcissus better with
that. Well that I mean that checks all your boxes. It's very surprising because it's not the way we normally understand narcissism, but I think you hit on for me. What's the maybe even it's at least as important as surprised 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 puzzling or that's you know, that's you know, sort of I think I'm almost always surprised when I say something from you know, here's here's a synthesis of research. Here's a meta-analysis and I think it's kind of obvious and people get excited about it because it gave them language to describe something they had felt but they didn't know how to articulate or talk about and I think that
I think this is why most of the most popular TED Talks are about human behavior because people are interested in people and if you learned something about you or about others, you don't have to immediately do anything with that to find it intriguing and even useful because it enriches your world view
recent guest on this podcast. We have an air date yet, but maybe it'll be out by time. This this area so is with Lisa Feldman Barrett. She's a
psychologist and neuroscientist right studies
emotion. And of course, yeah, and she
And how in certain cultures there is a language for subcategories of emotion so granularity. So, you know, I she described a word in Japanese. I don't recall with the word was that describes the feeling of sadness that one has after getting a particularly bad haircut something that I don't think you RI are familiar with but I'm familiar with from my experience of romantic Partners doing like really unhappy with their hair cutting you like you like you're sad, but there but by having a specific word for a specific experience
People feel less alone and the feeling passes more quickly in time and and then she gave some other examples from German and from you know, Scandinavian languages and so forth and I find this so interesting. It's like the moment people hear that they are not alone in an experience. There's nothing actionable about it, but it creates a cognitive shift thereafter in which they suffer less may feel more connected to others. I mean, I think it's really a beautiful example of
Exactly what you're referring to like when we learn about something and we identify with it. It's powerful.
It's very powerful and I think psychologists often say name it to tame it affect labeling is one of the most effective emotion regulation strategies. And we tell 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. It seems to allow people then to reason with and process whatever.
Over there feeling as opposed to allowing the feeling to control them and I probably got the clear sense of this and in 2021. I read a New York Times article on languishing the feeling of met or blah and I have never had anything. I any article I wrote resonate like this and it just all the post the post the tag mate were just like hit me hit me hit us and there's like these like one and two word reactions.
I don't think it was the content that mattered to people it was the just having the term all of a sudden people realize this is originally Cory Keys is research that I was referencing. It had been a light bulb for me to say there's a if you think about the spectrum of well-being this is related to your mental illness versus mental health distinction. Those are two extremes of the Continuum and I want to end we have depression and burnout on another end. We have, you know, well-being and flourishing languishing lives right in the middle as Corey describes it it's
The absence of well-being so you're not depressed. You still have hope you're not burned out you still have energy but you're not at Peak functioning you're missing a sense of purpose. You feel like you're stagnating and your empty and you know, there's something about just saying the word languishing that led people 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 the rules of consent.
Hits last time I checked but I think that that's something that that probably is underrepresented when we're trying to communicate as scientists to say one of the most valuable things we do is we give people language to talk about things and I think that's a massive part of of your impact is this is one of the big things I've learned from you actress. I used to be a little bit dismissive of cognitive Neuroscience in particular. I thought understanding the brain has not taught me that much about the mind being able to
All to you no Trace, let's take a simple example. Like when I read Joe ladoos research being able to trace, you know, certain amygdala responses, you know as the root of how people deal with fight or flight and and thread like, I don't know that that helped me that much if I could just describe fight-or-flight. Do I need the amygdala and you've convinced me? I was wrong about that because when people have when they understand that the neurological substrates,
Of their thoughts feelings and actions they believe them or they're like, oh like there is a mechanism for this is being produced inside my head and even though I can't see it it's there and it can be studied with the tools of science. I think that's a really big deal and I really regret the fact that I didn't spend more time on cognitive Neuroscience because I think I'd be a better sight better psychologist today.
Oh, well, you know, thanks for the kind words. I think that fortunate evolution in our fields or even field if I may
over the last 10 years is that whereas Neuroscience itself even needs to be subdivided into neuroanatomy and the neurophysiology. It's lumped into all Neuroscience, but it is now include psychology computational Neuroscience cognitive Neuroscience. It's all you know, I think I consider us, you know, we have different perspectives and different training obviously, but doing a lot of the same things just using different different dissection tools and different different language based tools and listen what you've done I want to
Masterfully, I mean we're just with like extreme virtuosity is to wrap your hands around such an enormous literature related to psychology. I'm in the human mind and behavior and thought processes and emotions and potential and you know, so many topics and two and two
extract the the most valuable gems from that literature and communicate them in a way that anyone can understand and it's a it's an extreme gift to be able to do that and it's and it's clear it's working because like you mentioned this article on languishing which we will provide a reference to or a link to in our caption because I want to go read that now, I mean, I'm always struck by this feeling of like it might I'm not tired but you know, like I've got tons to do but like why do I just want to like sit here for a
Only maybe I need to sit here, but then you get into all the like that okay, but you know, I need it. There's a lot to do. There's a lot of get up and go. I don't want to waste my life. And yeah rest is good too. But I think languishing is something that like I definitely can resonate with that. So when I had a bulldog, it felt a lot easier to do because he was always languishing but do you ever just languish or you busy enough that you you just feel like you're always forward Center of
mass. I think everybody languages. I think it's part of the human condition and I think it might even be evolutionarily adapted.
Civ because I remember another sort of mind-altering idea. I remember reading Randy nessie's argument that mild depression could be evolutionarily functional that you know, obviously clinical depression is debilitating in a lot of ways but low-grade sadness Lincoln's Melancholy. We know one of the one of the things they can do is broaden your field of vision. And for for many people sadness is a signal that something is not working.
And it can motivate problem solving it can in some cases open access to New Perspectives. Unfortunately, those potential benefits of sadness 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 hard to harness but I had a similar thought about languishing from this perspective to say that, you know, maybe moments of languishing open us up to change when we get stuck. Sometimes we
You have to move backward in order to make progress. Sometimes you have to unlearn things that you thought you knew in order to keep growing. And you know, I don't friend of mine said he read my languishing pieces. Like you're not the languishing type like okay, maybe everybody's Baseline is different. Like I think one of the things I'm really lucky to have is high reserves of energy, but for me languishing is like I felt like I did.
Today and you know in a typical day like if I'm writing a book I should be able to write 1,000 words. I'm proud of and I don't like a single word that I produced or I sat at my blinking cursor like staring at the computer screen and for the umpteenth time wondered like do they call it a cursor because of all the writers who cursed
it
and then I end up like Googling. What's the like what are the Latin roots of the word cursor? Where did this come from? And like that is not a good use of time. That's like that's not forward Mass. That's
like I'm spinning so so good. Yeah, I think everybody languages and I aspire to do it less often but not
never loved it. What does Kirsten what is the root of cursor people look it up put a folks put in the put it in the comments on YouTube.
I did. I did look it up. Oh
good. Okay, you'll tell us no.
No II feel like there's there's a footnote in Hidden potential and I'm trying to remember it comes from hooray. I think and the cursor originally came.
Nope, I don't want to do it. I'm gonna give it I don't
remember. This is a your hypocrite. Your hippocampus is smart enough to have discarded that information and you have more important things to do forgive me for asking the question folks put in the comments on YouTube so good. I have one more question about potential you have children, correct three and a lot of our listeners either our children or have children and even for those that don't have children. I'm curious with the
A vast array of knowledge that you now have about potential and the fact that kids are these incredible sponges? Right? They I mean they certainly experience discomfort. We know that they are sponges. We absolutely know that sometimes their filters we try and teach them to be filters and hopefully they are in perfectionist maybe their kids. They're just perfectionist by default. But to imagine that they are because standards come about when we become aware of other people's performance.
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. Oh
interesting. Well, the first thing I should say is Becky Kennedy. Dr. Becky is my favorite 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 her.
Kids, but my wife Allison is her instincts about effective parenting are so sophisticated. I feel like every day I learn something from watching her communicate with our kids and so I came in thinking. All right, 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 enough. There's a chapter that had nothing to do with parenting where
Oh, actually I'm reading this research and there was a moment where I did something well and I didn't even mean to do it and this is something that I think everyone probably under utilizes it I don't actually that's an overstatement. I think a lot of people don't appreciate the importance of this approach to Parenting and I am trying to do it more often so quick quick story and then I'll back up into the principal. So I was getting ready to get my first Ted Talk number of years ago.
Extremely nervous. I'm a shy introvert. I was for a long time afraid of public speaking. I remember in college literally shaking to raise my hand being that nervous and now I'm supposed to get in the red circle not my idea of comfort zone and have been a mentioned to our oldest daughter that I was nervous and I asked her for advice on what I should do and she said I think I think at the time let's see it. She must have been
She was seven. Maybe six seven maybe six. Anyway, she said look for a smiling face in the audience.
So it was it was one of those moments were like, oh that's such a good idea. Why didn't I think of that? Yes, I can do that. I know people who are gonna be in the audience. So I asked a couple of friends to sit in the front rows and I locked eyes with a couple of them and my nerves went down a little bit. So a couple weeks later. Joanna is getting ready to be in a school play and she's also shy and introverted and she's nervous and she asked us for advice.
And instead of telling her what to do. I said well, what did you suggest to me a few weeks ago? And she she remembered and she said look for a smiling face and it was it was one of like the It was one of the most moving moments of my life like Allison and I got to the play and she looked at us and she beamed and I just I think what I learned from that
experience was kids need to feel that they matter.
And most of us think about mattering as you know, showing kids that their 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 advice that boosted her confidence and I think that this is I've come to call this the coach effect. It's one of my favorite recent findings in Psychology that when when you're struggling
With
something. Your instinct is to go to somebody else for advice and say I need guidance. The problem is that keeps you in a passive frame of mind. 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 shows you that you have something to give it boosts your efficacy the research on this by Lauren s Chris Winkler and colleagues is fascinating. So people who give advice instead of receiving it randomly assigned.
And up more motivated and more confident and I think this is something every parent could do right whatever challenge you think your kid is going to face find a version of it that you're grappling with and seek their guidance on it. And when they run into that same challenge, they will have confidence that they can begin to figure it out on their own and you can be a coach in that process as opposed to just telling them what to do which they may feel like is not relevant or they may resist because they don't want to be told what to do by a parent. So that is my favorite parenting.
Something from it and potential.
I love that and I love your statement that you know kids like adults want to matter. You know that being it, you know, we hear, you know, make them feel important but so often that's tied to Performance metrics and those performance metrics are the very things that are making them nervous or that are creating anxiety. I love it. Are you taking additional kids for adoption? Because I'm raising raising raising my hand.
I think there'd be a lot more developmental psychologists in the world.
If if we chose our careers later.
Super interesting topic. And by the way, I'm very much looking forward to reading your book hidden potential. Clearly. I have a lot to resolve around that issue because I still here miss Rolfe in the in Middle School. Just telling me how much potential we have and that and then I wasn't accessing mine. Oh, I'd say like a voice in the back of my head all the time. And even though I feel very happy with many aspects of my life that there are a lot of things that I want to do that I
Having done and I think it's through, you know, limit limited. What do they call limiting self-beliefs or things of that sort of medieval a self-limiting beliefs. There you go. I can't even say the phrase.
I do think all your fans. Yeah that Andrew huberman really hasn't he hasn't really tapped his potential at all. He's wondering at
all. Well, keep in mind. I've lived in a fairly narrow trench of of pursuit, you know at 19. I got into this and I've been doing this for like researching and teaching and doing research like
For pretty much all I've done for like almost you heading into 30 years. So and you two you've been in this in this game for a long time and that'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 know, reaching outside of we hear about our comfort zone, but it's also reaching into like deeper wishes and thoughts and I keep going back to this idea of the tag-team podcast and and the origins of that
Your mind is like I would never would have expected that but it also reveals something that sounds kind of like intrinsic to you. Like you maybe you like to see things play out the way you think they should be played out as opposed to the what's clearly a intractable Battle of loggerheads these yes. That is that's a core
value. Like I think the I can't imagine an unsolvable problem. I love that
and I want your I want your brain. Listen Adam.
I want to thank you. First of all for taking the time today to come talk to us. Certainly not just about your book, but we covered an enormous range of topics. I mean you talk to us about procrastination which is sort of like the third rail of life for so many people creativity and trinsic extrinsic motivation and blind spots authenticity and so much more but also I want to thank you for being such an active teacher on social media in the classroom. You still run a research program you do.
TED Talks, your writing multiple books, you know your absolute Phenom in terms of the amount of information that you're putting out into the world. And I must say I always always always learn from your posts your podcast your books. Like there's certain people in the world are exceedingly rare, but you're one of them that when they open their mouth people learn and they learn valuable knowledge and it's a 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 considering the source because I the sentiments are mutual. I think every time I whether it's reading one of your posts or seeing one of your reels my overwhelming thought is that as a master teacher and if I had been lucky enough to take one of your classes, I might have gone more of the Neuroscience Direction. Well that fails that know it would have been interesting to learn more about it minimum and I just have
- admiration for your commitment to Making Science interesting clear and useful to people
thank you. I consider us on the on the same team in in that regard and and I probably will tap you about a potential collaboration. I be so much fun to like a blast 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 other topics we could talk about and that we
should
Honored will try not to make you regret that
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