Last Neanderthals Podcast
Stories that shape futures. Last Neanderthals is a podcast dedicated to learning, evolving and becoming our best selves. Evolve with us!
Last Neanderthals Podcast
Adam Grant: How To Really Unlock Your Hidden Potential || Worlds Leading Organisational Psychologist
Unlock your hidden potential and transform your understanding of human behavior with insights from Adam Grant, a revered organisational psychologist and best-selling author. In this episode dam tackles the myth of learning styles, urging listeners to challenge their preferred methods for genuine growth. Experience Adam’s wisdom on balancing conviction with openness and how seeking discomfort can be a powerful catalyst for personal development.
Explore the pitfalls of the education system with Adam as he highlights the often-overlooked significance of student progress and adversity over mere academic perfection. Adam shares innovative strategies like motivational interviewing and peer advice to cultivate a growth mindset among students. Learn how to offer guidance without being overbearing, emphasizing humility, curiosity, and clearly defined purposes to break down resistance and foster meaningful change.
Finally, delve into the importance of self-compassion and the concept of defensive pessimism in achieving success without self-sabotage. Hear Adam’s thoughts on generational differences in motivation and the rise of victim identity, urging a shift towards personal responsibility. This episode also shares personal stories and practical advice on embracing discomfort for growth, connecting actions with core motivators, and leveraging anticipated regret for positive outcomes. Join us for an enriching conversation filled with actionable insights and inspiring anecdotes.
This was an incredible experience for us, we are truly grateful to Adam for coming on our Podcast at the very beginning of our journey. We learned a huge amount through this podcast and we hope we did a good job at bringing you guys that value too.
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There's some evidence that people who are narcissistic, machiavellian and psychopathic are more likely to complain that they're a victim in every situation. They know that they can earn people's support by claiming that they've been wrong all the time. Adam Grant, a renowned organizational psychologist and best-selling author.
Speaker 2:Adam is a professor at the Wharton School and has written influential books like Give and Take and Think Again. So how do we make people believe that they have the potential within them?
Speaker 1:Psychologists find that the best person to convince people is themselves.
Speaker 2:How do you balance having conviction in your ideas and taking input?
Speaker 1:You don't want to doubt yourself, wondering whether you're making false assumptions. That's important. I think a lot of people don't do enough of it.
Speaker 2:There is something in your book that really interested me. You said you need to seek discomfort.
Speaker 1:I don't think seeking out discomfort means that you have to not enjoy what you're doing.
Speaker 3:Why do you think we are so mean to ourselves?
Speaker 1:Well, why are you so mean to yourself?
Speaker 3:That's a very good question. We also have some questions from a couple of people. One of them was what steps are you taking to help your kids unlock their hidden potential? Um?
Speaker 1:it's a really good question.
Speaker 2:I don't that's a great answer. I didn't think that's how you're going to respond to that. Me neither. We've been speaking about this recently, and I read about it in the book as well. I've always said I'm a visual and like audio learner, but apparently that's not a thing. It's made up. Yeah, so that's that's. I found that really interesting. Could you tell us a little bit more about how that works?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think this is so important for education because most teachers around the world have been taught, just like you were, that every student has a learning style. Uh, some of us are auditory learners. We learn by listening. Uh, we like listening to podcasts, for example. Uh, others are verbal or visual learners we like to read, um. And some are kinesthetic learners Uh, we learned by doing.
Speaker 1:And it turns out this is a myth. Decades of research show that you might have a way that you like to learn, but you don't actually learn better in that medium, and sometimes the medium that's hard for you actually leads to more learning because you have to work more at it, and so I think we have to get out of the comfort zone of our learning styles and stop pigeonholing ourselves by saying, well, I only learned one way of the comfort zone of our learning styles, and stop pigeonholing ourselves by saying, well, I only learned one way. Reality is different. Mediums are good for different things, so listening is better for immersion. It's better for emotion. Reading with your eyes is actually better for memory and for critical thinking.
Speaker 2:Do they know why that is?
Speaker 1:It's a really good question. I don't I don't know that I've seen can totally convincing evidence on the mechanisms, but I think part of what's happening is, when you listen, you can be drawn in by the charisma of the speaker, and people can get away with with a sloppy argument. Uh, you're also less likely to replay what you're listening to, whereas when you read their natural stopping points, there's a period, there's a comma. Yeah, and do you think as well, when you read, there are natural stopping points, there's a period there's a comma, yeah, and do you think as well.
Speaker 2:When you sit down to go and read something, it's almost like you're in a mindset where you're like, okay, I have to really focus, I have to really learn, whereas when you're listening to someone, it's more of like a relaxed, like comforting type of thing that's fascinating.
Speaker 1:I've never thought about that before, but I I intuitively, I think you're right. Um, reading a book is it? Demands total concentration. Most of the podcast listening I do. I'm doing something else. Yeah, I'm either trying yeah, I'm trying to fall asleep, I'm driving, I'm taking out the garbage, I'm at the dentist occasionally, uh, yeah, and and maybe maybe you're just multitasking more, although I know in in some of the controlled experiments that have have done the comparison um, you're not given another task and so you're consuming the exact same information, either hearing it or reading it, and even then there's a critical thinking and memory advantage for reading with your eyes.
Speaker 2:That's fascinating. I really wonder why that is. But that brings us to a really like another interesting point. We want to know what was the moment or the stimulus that made you think I need to write this book, which is Hidden Potentials.
Speaker 1:I was, I was, I was actually I was on book tour for my previous book, think Again, and somebody asked me what my proudest accomplishment was. And I thought about it and I had a couple of candidates and they were all things that I started out bad at. And I thought that was interesting Because the narrative in the US S that I was introduced to about success was play to your strengths. And yet my proudest achievements were when I played to my weaknesses and I just I thought that was intriguing. And then I wanted to know well, why.
Speaker 1:Why was I proud of those accomplishments? Because I had to travel a great, a great distance in order to reach them and I felt like the things that came naturally to me, like I didn't really earn them, like I have a good memory and you know I'd gotten a lot of praise for like somebody asked me a question and I can rattle off the study and the authors and the sources and you know, like, should I be proud of this mental library of knowledge I carry around? No, it's just there. I didn't. I didn't work for it. Things I read, they just stick. I carry around no, it's just there, I didn't work for it. Things I read, they just stick.
Speaker 1:Learning to become a writer after failing a writing test in university and being assigned to remedial writing yeah, that took real effort, and so I feel like I earned more of that. Getting good at public speaking when I'm an introvert, I'm shy and I was terrified of being on stage I felt like that was more my effort, and so I guess at some point I realized my most meaningful accomplishments have been in areas where I had hidden potential. I had a capacity for growth that was invisible to me and, frankly, invisible to some of the people around me, and eventually I thought you know what? I've lived this, and there's a lot of evidence about how it's time to write the book.
Speaker 3:Why do you think that is that we, whenever something is given to us, we don't really take pride in it, but when we earn it the hard way, that's when it like feels rewarding.
Speaker 1:I think we want to feel responsible for our results, and so you know, if you're born with a natural gift for something, you might credit your parents for it or, more accurately, you might credit your genes for it, which your parents didn't deliberately pass on to you, and that means you don't like it wasn't you.
Speaker 1:At the end of the day, there's no sense of ownership. I think when you initially struggle at something and you get better at it, you can not only take pride in the outcome. You also get to see your progress along the way and you remember the choices you made and the adjustments that you had to make in order to get there. And and I think that makes it feel like something that, uh, you, when you have to overcome an obstacle, um, or you know, turn, turn a. I guess the way, I guess the way that I've thought about it is you, you sort of run into a barrier and then you say, okay, well, opportunity didn't knock. Well, let me try to build a door. And if you built the door like, okay, I get to, I get to open it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's perfect. So where do you lie on the nurture versus nature scale, then Genetics versus your circumstances?
Speaker 1:It's a really good question and I'm going to give a very clear answer. It's always a combination of the two, always. There is no question in psychology that isn't answered by a mix of nature and nurture. I think we underestimate the importance of nurture and we think that I mean we do this to ourselves and we do it to others. If you're initially bad at something, you're out of luck, like you weren't born with the talent. You're not a child prodigy. You should give up and empirically that's just false.
Speaker 1:There are many late bloomers. If you look at studies of world-class athletes, artists, scientists, musicians, you see that most of them did not stand out when they were young. Their teachers didn't see their potential, their coaches didn't see their potential. Even their own parents didn't know how great they were going to become. And when they did stand out, it was not because of their natural ability. In most cases it was because of their unusual motivation. They were passionate, they were driven, they were persistent, and I think that's good news for all of us, because it means that even if you're not a freak of nature, you can become a freak of nurture.
Speaker 3:In the education system, like if we're not getting certain grades despite being hard, working hard, we're not really rewarded. What do you think we can implement in the education system that students that are persistent, that have you know hidden potential, that they are able to unlock it?
Speaker 1:I think the mistake that we make is we assume only the straight A students are going to end up going on to do great things, and the reality is, if you want to predict people's future success, what matters probably more is their trajectory of progress. So I am really excited to invest in a student who started out with Ds and then got Bs and then moved up to, as it's usually a sign that they faced some adversity early on. Maybe they had a severe lack of opportunity, maybe their parents never finished school, maybe they grew up in poverty, maybe they had a tragedy in their family and they struggled and then they figured out how to overcome it. And I don't think we do nearly enough to look at what was the overall slope of your progress. We just look at the peak that you reach, and that's a huge mistake.
Speaker 2:So how do we make people believe that they have the potential within them to go from D's to A's? Because it's so difficult having this conversation with people that you are able to do that I think we.
Speaker 1:Actually, you can't convince someone of. That is the first thing to recognize. I mean, you want to, but psychologists find that the best person to convince people is themselves. People are much more likely to trust their own arguments. So how do you get people to persuade themselves? I know of two ways. One is called motivational interviewing, which is something psychologists do, where they say, look, you can't convince somebody to change. You can help them find their own reasons to change. But you have to be genuinely interested in helping them, as opposed to, you know, trying to get them to do what you want them to do.
Speaker 1:So you know, a standard motivational interview would be something like in the realm of grades. I might ask you, you know, talk to me about how your grades are going so far and then tell me about your study habits. Have you thought about any changes that might improve your grades and what are your reasons for trying those changes and what are your reasons for not trying them? And then you basically ask a bunch of questions and listen and in some cases people will say you know what? Actually I do want to. You know, I want to spend an extra two hours a week studying, or maybe it's time for me to get a tutor. Or maybe I should try out the Conmigo, the AI tutor that Khan Academy put out, and they come up with ideas and they get excited about them and then they become kind of the authors of their own motivation.
Speaker 1:That's one option. The other option, which I'm a bigger fan of because it's much easier to do, is you take somebody who's struggling in school and you ask them to give advice to a fellow student who's struggling. And guess what? When you give advice to somebody else, it builds your confidence, it raises your motivation, because in the process of convincing somebody else that they can do it, you're telling yourself that you're capable too. Advice it's actually the act of giving advice that fires us up. So I would actually, if I were going to design this, I would say you want an older student giving advice to somebody who's you know a couple, maybe a couple of years younger than them, and then they're going to say, hey, wait a minute, maybe I can pull that off.
Speaker 3:Well, one of the challenges I faced with that is that you come across as a preacher when you give advice. And, like one of my friend was struggling and I tried giving them advice what went wrong for me and I overcame it and they kind of became defensive or felt inferior. So how do we overcome that?
Speaker 1:I think. I think humility and curiosity are so important in that process. So I've I've run into the same trap Uh, I've, I've had for years. Students would come into office hours, they would ask me for career advice, and then I would start giving them advice and they immediately resist. A student is planning to do a banking career, and I feel like my job is to make sure they've really thought this through clearly.
Speaker 1:And too many of our students at Wharton go into banking, and so my job is to poke holes in their logic, and the harder I do that, the more they think that I'm prosecuting their ideas and then preaching whatever alternative I'm proposing to them and that just falls flat. It fails over and over again, and eventually I try to get less stubborn and I say, okay, when students come into my office, I need to find out why they're here, and so I'll ask the question are you actually looking for me to recommend a direction? Because if you are, I'm not going to do that for you. I don't know what's best for you. You're the only person who can know that. What I can do is I can help you clarify your values and your goals and assess whether the path you're considering is going to align with those. So let me know if you want to have that conversation.
Speaker 1:Are you looking for someone to pressure test your assumptions? If so, I'm happy to challenge and give you my reasons why this is a terrible direction to go in. And if you want to do that, I'm game. Or are you here because you're looking for my approval and you've already made up your mind and you want someone other than your parents to validate the choice you've already committed to? And guess what, if that's your plan, you don't need my approval. You already have it. If you think this is going to contribute to your happiness or your success, I'm on board. And getting their buy-in on what the purpose of the conversation is completely changes the equation. I'm much clearer about what my role is, and also they've they've agreed to whatever role I'm going to play, so I think that's that's my favorite way to get out of the preaching or prosecuting mode.
Speaker 2:But you said there that you, or whoever it is, as an individual, know what's best for you. But I struggle with that sometimes. Like I'm 21 years old, I've barely lived any life. Compared to like, for example, my parents are much older, experience much more. So how do I know what's best for me when I've got like no experience relatively?
Speaker 1:That's an interesting question, I think I guess what I would say is nobody else can tell you what your values are. And the way that you gauge your values is first, you look at your role models and you ask of the people you look up to, what are the things they all have in common? And usually that leads you to a clear list of values. So when I did that exercise, every single person I looked up to was an exemplar of generosity, humility, integrity and curiosity. I'm like okay, those are principles for me, those are things that I want to stand for.
Speaker 1:I think that's the first step. I think a second step then is um, you know, you try out an activity, or you know, you imagine having made a decision, and you ask yourself does this feel like me, uh? And in some cases the answer is yes, and other and others the answer is no, no. Other people are great sources of insight on that and I think they can expand your perspective, but they can't give you the answer at the end of the day, because they don't know what it feels like to be you.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that is a good point. Yeah, because the issue with myself is I get in this trap of being too stubborn. So how-? Welcome to the club.
Speaker 1:Smart people problem, overconfident people problem, exactly that's what it is.
Speaker 2:So, um, how do you balance, like having conviction in your ideas and taking input, but still believing that this path is right for me? Or what I'm saying is, what is the best thing to do versus being humble and having that humility to know that, okay, these opinions might be very beneficial, or they might even be better than what I'm saying.
Speaker 1:Well, I think, I think you want to have the right kind of doubt. You don't want to doubt yourself. You do want to doubt your ideas. I think you know questioning whether you are a capable human being it's not a helpful exercise Wondering whether you're making false assumptions or you're going down a path you might regret. That's important, and I think a lot of people don't do enough of it.
Speaker 1:So one of the things I actually one of the things that came out of my my many office hours failures was encouraging students to do checkups. Like you know how you go to the doctor even when nothing's wrong. Well, why don't we do that in our lives too? So the thought was and I had a bunch of students try it and come back and say this is really helpful. So, um, I'm I'm now a fan, and actually there's some research on it as well that suggests this is a good thing to do in your romantic relationship is you put a reminder in your calendar, let's say twice a year, to check in on whether your decisions and actions are aligning with your values? And let's say it's a career checkup you could be asking yourself you know, is the major that I've taken in school? Or you know the job I'm pursuing. Is it living up to the expectations that I had when I started?
Speaker 1:If I knew then what I know now, would I still have gone down this road? If the answer is no, it might be time to rethink your direction. You could ask yourself is this, you know? Is this the lifestyle I want? Are my choices giving me the amount of free time and autonomy that I'm hoping to have?
Speaker 1:And in that process, I love having a challenge network, which, to me, is the opposite of what most of us go to, which is a support network.
Speaker 1:When you're struggling with a decision or you're not sure what to think, you go to your biggest cheerleaders, the people who you know are going to have your back, and the problem is that they basically reinforce your existing convictions. A challenge network does the opposite. That's somebody who holds up a mirror and helps you see your blind spots more clearly. And when I do checkups, I'll reach out to a few people who are good at getting me to rethink things and I'll say, okay, first of all, just tell me something that I do, or think that you think I should rethink, which is a mouthful of a sentence, but what's something I should question, and I collect input that way and then I'll run by them a couple of specific ideas I'm considering and say you know, turn this upside down for me. What might I be wrong about? And we always end up discovering after we've made a decision that there's, you know, there's something that we got wrong. I would rather identify that upfront and avoid the mistake than have to learn from it on the backend.
Speaker 2:What happens if you go to them. You ask them that and they're like everything you're doing is wrong. You need a complete 180.
Speaker 1:Well, now you have a critic instead of a cheerleader, and what you want is a coach. Well, now you have a critic instead of a cheerleader, and what you want is a coach. So the research on this is really clear in saying you can get your cheerleaders and critics to be coaches if you ask them for advice instead of feedback. Instead of asking them okay, what feedback do you have, where they'll tell you either what you did right or a lot that you did wrong, you say what advice do you have? What guidance can you offer me on what I can do better next time? They get more specific, they get more actionable, they focus on the future instead of the past, and then they become a little more helpful so I'm on the opposite x uh spectrum to wally.
Speaker 3:I get this imposter syndrome. I've been the student who's gone, you know, like I was getting D's and E's and then I made my way up and actually started doing well in school but then that came with a lot of imposter syndrome and you know, my life has been quite uncertain, moving countries, and it's just like whenever things would be going well, I would voluntarily make things worse and I would be like afraid of success. How can one overcome that?
Speaker 1:Well, it sounds like you're your own worst enemy.
Speaker 3:Yes, yes, my teachers will say that I'm like they have never met someone who's harder on themselves than I was, especially in the past.
Speaker 1:It sounds like you're missing some self-compassion. Do you know Kristen Neff's research? No, okay, so she coined the term. She's an education psychologist who has people go through this great exercise that after you do it it takes about 10 minutes you get an increase in happiness, a decrease in anxiety, lower tendency to beat yourself up and ruminate about your mistakes and actually still more growth afterwards. So what in the world could that exercise be? I'm like I see this research. Tell me, how do I learn self-compassion?
Speaker 1:What she randomly assigns people to do is just to write a letter to yourself as if you were writing to a good friend, showing them the kindness and understanding and then turning that inward. So let's say, for example, you disappoint yourself by I don't know. You get a 98% on a test in school and you knew you were aiming for the 100 and anything less is unacceptable to you and you're kicking yourself, you're kind of depressed about it. Kristen would say okay, imagine that you have a friend who wanted 100 and they only got a 98. What would you say to that friend?
Speaker 1:You would not say you're a moron, you're the dumbest person I've ever met. I can't believe that you missed those two points. What's wrong with you, you're never going to amount to anything. You're a failure, your life is worthless. But people do have those thoughts themselves, right? And so Kristen says you think about what you would say to your friend. You then give yourself that own compassion, and it allows you to learn from the mistakes without having to dwell on them. Why do you think we are so mean to ourselves? Well, why are you so mean to yourself?
Speaker 3:It's a very good question. I've just always had, like childhood, low self-esteem and I was, you know, looking for validation, initially trying to impress, make my parents proud, do well in my studies, and I don't know. Even when I got like the A A's, I went from being like viewing myself as a failure. Even when I got the grades, I was still wasn't content. There was still a hole in me that I was trying to fill and I just didn't know how to, how to do that and I don't know. It's just, I still don't know why I was so mean to myself. Yeah, I guess I need to. So how would one find out, like how? How does one go about exploring these emotions? So I know where, where the root of the cause is. Is it trauma? Is it childhood trauma? Like is it? Is it a bad experience with a friend? How does one go about that?
Speaker 1:I don't know that we're ever going to know Like. I think you can spend a lot of time trying to excavate your past and you can come up with hypotheses. Yeah, I went through a traumatic experience. Or I had amazing parents and I really wanted to live up to their standards, or I had parents who put a lot of pressure on me and I felt like I had to live up, and there's research on all these things we know, for example, in the UK, the US, canada, perfectionism has been rising and a lot of people are like oh, instagram, everyone else looks perfect. Social media does seem to be a small contributing factor, but the trend started a whole generation before there was social media, starting, I think, in the late 1980s.
Speaker 1:And what you can see this is Tom Curran's research. He shows that parental expectations have gone up over time, and so has harsh criticism from parents when you don't meet those expectations. And we could blame parents for that. I don't want to blame parents for that.
Speaker 1:We're in an increasingly competitive world in the sense that I think in a lot of Western countries in particular, we have a generation that's not going to have better opportunities than their parents for the first time in who knows how long, and so parents are fighting to give their kids every opportunity. It's much harder to get into university now than it was 20 years ago, right, and so I think that a zero-sum world, where it seems like there's not enough success to go around, means that parents feel like the best way to serve you and help you is to make sure that the expectations are sky high. And what they don't realize when they do that is they're setting you up for a cycle of always feeling like a failure, and eventually that leads to shame, burnout, withdrawal, and it becomes a vicious cycle. So I think I don't know. I guess one of the things that leaves me curious about is what have you found helps you not beat yourself up?
Speaker 3:I think, reflecting when I look at the, when I'm very mean to myself because for me it's like the pressure up on myself it's not necessarily external, because for me it's like the pressure up on myself, it's not necessarily external. So what helps me then is reflecting how far I've come and reminding myself of, like you know, I need to be patient and but again, it's very difficult because it's like I have fear of failure. That still lingers in my heart and even a failure of success, like I'm not I'm. I feel almost it feels too foreign sometimes when life is going well, like I've gone through like existential crisis where I'm like being anticipating, like because I almost lost my sisters, I almost lost my sister, so like that was just, I was just constantly paranoid about when are things gonna go wrong. So then I would voluntarily make things go wrong and oh, you said, like imposter syndrome and these things can be good. So how do we avoid the self-sabotage aspect of it?
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's a really good question. So you're making me think about what psychologists call defensive pessimism. Have you ever heard the term? Okay, so think about when you guys were in school. You have a big test coming up in a week and you really want to do well. What do you do to prepare? If you're an optimist, you envision the best possible outcome, you imagine yourself acing this test, you crush it and that positive vision of the future inspires you to study really hard.
Speaker 1:If you're a defensive pessimist slightly different emotional experience About a week before the test, you wake up at 2 am in a cold sweat. You've just had a nightmare that you did so badly on the exam that your teacher took away points on your previous exam because there's no way you earned them. I'm not going to. I was going to say Kushal. I think that's you, and that fear, that anxiety, motivates you to study hard. And guess what? Both of those groups do equally well, but they're propelled by different emotions.
Speaker 1:If you take a defensive pessimist and you encourage them and make them feel good about their performance, they actually get sabotaged, they get complacent. And the thought here this is Julie Norm's work. What she shows is that if you are a defensive pessimist instead of trying to change it, you can harness it, and this is the way you prevent self-sabotage is you say, defensive pessimism is useful in advance, because anxiety is what motivates me to prepare, and so a week or two, or however much lead time, you need to practice. You purposely start worrying about what could go wrong so that you've given yourself enough of a window to try to prevent the bad outcome and you recognize that's a strategy for you. And by the time the test shows up, your anxiety is gone because you've done your homework and you know you're ready. And I think, instead of running away from that, why?
Speaker 3:not embrace it. But then how do I avoid the complacency aspect too, because I'm very important and I think a lot of students must be like when they do well, they're relaxed, like how does one keep going? Especially, like you said, it's such a competitive and demanding world that we live in.
Speaker 1:Well, I think there, what you do is you do two things. Number one you ask yourself how can I keep growing? And that keeps you focused on some opportunity for improvement. The other thing you do is you imagine the bad things that will happen if you don't prepare. I think I worry a lot about students who misattribute their success, so it's so common. I've had this in class over and over again A student gets an outstanding grade on a paper and then it's like, wow, I'm a great writer. And then they do worse on the next paper because they failed to realize it was the effort they which is. It's a combination of your abilities and your motivation that made you successful, and if you take your foot off the motivation pedal, your abilities are not going to do you much good.
Speaker 2:I've seen recently that people, especially of older generations than ours, have been saying that Gen Z, all of this, they lack motivational and they lack motivation and they lack hard work. So what do you think about that? Are you guys, gen Z?
Speaker 1:I think so. Yeah, I thought so Cool, so I'm Gen X. I think I'm a young Gen X. I guess I'm almost a millennial, but not even close.
Speaker 3:Hi guys, hope you're enjoying the conversation. Thank you so much for tuning in. Remember to like and subscribe. It helps us a lot.
Speaker 1:I think it's a huge mistake to make big claims about generational differences. Why? Because, let's say we compare us and let's say I'm a harder worker than both of you. Is that because I'm a Gen Xer and you're a Gen Zer? Or is that because I'm older than you and I have more life experience? We don't know. They're confounded, right. By definition, each generation that came first is also older and more experienced than the younger ones. So in order to get around that problem, there's a psychologist, gene Twenge, who pioneered this method.
Speaker 1:You get data on each generation at the same stage of life. So you take surveys of 18-year-olds in the 1960s, 70s, 80s, 90s, 2000s and then you start to compare them and you can do that with 21-year-olds too and if you look at the data, age differences swamp generational differences. Yeah, most of what we think is Gen X versus Gen Z is actually just. This is what a typical 42 year old tends to do, and here's what's pretty common among 22 year olds. So I think we shouldn't attribute much to generation Like how much do you have in common with everyone who was born in the same 20 year period as you?
Speaker 1:Not much. I mean certain kinds of life events, certain kinds of technological changes, world events, sure, but your personalities, your values, they're not that much a function of your generation. Other thing I would say is there's some recent work by psychologists on this, which is so fun. It turns out, every generation complains about the next generation, and there are two reasons behind this. So they tend to stereotype younger generations negatively. One, because they only remember the best of their generation, and two, they focus on only the things they don't like of the next generation. And so if you overcome those two biases, you realize kids these days are not as bad as we think.
Speaker 2:But do you think there's any aspect of social media and the way the world is going now that exacerbates that problem? For example, it seems now in our generation especially, there's a lot of people almost want to be victims, like they want to be victimized. Do you think that's a result of social media?
Speaker 1:I don't think social media has helped there. I think the yeah actually there's. There's a bunch of work that's come out recently on victim identity and victim personality and the idea that some people and I'm not talking about being the target of abuse or suffering traumatic events, I'm talking about people who complain that they're a victim in every situation and then also broadcast their suffering to try to earn sympathy. It turns out there's some evidence that people who are narcissistic, machiavellian and psychopathic are more likely to do this because they know that they can kind of earn people's support by claiming that they've been wronged all the time, and I think that's a huge problem because it stops people from taking responsibility from their mistakes. Is that a generational thing? I don't know. Is it something that seems to have gained currency in the last decade more than before? My hunches? Yes, but I don't know. Jerry's still out. Um, it certainly.
Speaker 1:It's troubling to me. There's a sense of entitlement, right that if I didn't get what I want, it's because somebody else screwed me, as opposed to, well, let's think about, is there anything I could have done differently that might've helped me succeed? And that's not to say, of course, that a lot of people aren't denied opportunity and that the world isn't full of disadvantages. But if you constantly walk around feeling like a victim, like a chip is on your shoulder, it's hard to imagine that you're ever gonna take the initiative to change your circumstances where you can.
Speaker 2:Do you think that's a result of, like, being comfortable in life? Because, like we're from Swat Valley in Pakistan, we went through Talibanization so we're kind of used to a different culture, but over here it's it's a very comfortable for the most part. Obviously, a lot of people still struggle, but for the average middle-class person they're living a very good life. They don't have to worry about like a bomb being dropped on their house, for example. So do you think that that results in people looking for then other problems in their life?
Speaker 1:Sometimes. I think that one of the consistent findings that's come out in social science is that people who grow up fortunate tend to have a greater sense of entitlement. They expect the world to cater to them, and people who grow up in environments of scarcity are more likely to appreciate the opportunities they have. They're less likely to take things for granted, and so I do think that our upbringing shapes our expectations, and there's even some work showing that if you graduate from school during a recession economically, when it's hard to get a job, two decades later you're more satisfied with your job. Yeah, this is Emily. You had to struggle when you were starting your career. You don't take for granted the fact that you're going to have a job and that makes you a little more appreciative of you know. Work that allows you to support your family and have a community and make a contribution, even if it's not a perfect job.
Speaker 2:You also. You weren't lying about remembering all these sources and things.
Speaker 1:It's in the job description also. It's very impressive but uh, or, or you know, distracting and not useful to non-academics, who knows?
Speaker 2:no, it's really fascinating, to be honest. But that takes me back to an earlier point. Like it's so difficult to have a balance with these things, like with this you want people to be comfortable, but you don't want them to have that sort of like victim or entitlement. And then, with the earlier thing you said, when kids are almost neglected at a young age and not shown the support that they need, they go on to be high achievers, but obviously that's not really the desired thing. You don't want to like make children feel bad. So, like, how do you find the balance there?
Speaker 1:I don't know, I just study it. How do you guys find the balance? How do you think about that?
Speaker 2:oh, I don't know. See, I I do worry about when I have kids, like. I feel like parenting is probably the most difficult job out there and I'm fortunate.
Speaker 1:I'll endorse that one.
Speaker 2:I'm fortunate to have very good parents, but there is a split between me and my brother. So my brother was very intelligent his whole life, but for some reason I got a lot more praise growing up, so I was very like all the time oh he's, he's the smart one, he's um athletic, he's all this. Whereas my brother was, oh, he's hard working. But that made me lazy and that made him actually really hard working and also he is very intelligent himself. So it resulted in like really good outcomes. He's a doctor now. So I don't know, it's difficult because I feel very content in myself because of all this validation I've received my whole life, but it has, I think, made me a little bit lazy compared to my brother.
Speaker 1:So interesting. I mean, some of what you're describing is what Carol Dweck originally put on the map when she studied growth mindset and found that if you only praise intelligence, uh, then you sometimes see kids stop trying because they think they're just smart. And especially if they fail, then they think, well, I just didn't have the ability for that. And they move on, whereas if you get praised for your effort, you learn okay, I've got to, I've got to actually do the work to get the result. I do think this is a really interesting challenge, but I don't personally see a tension between self-acceptance and growth. I think you can do both at the same time. I think self-acceptance is about being content with what you've accomplished to date, and it may be even being proud of of the distance you've traveled. I think continuing to strive for growth is trying to raise the bar for your future self. So I I think about this a lot personally, because I'll tell you a little story. So, um, my second book was about to come out and I got a call from a friend and she said what are you doing to celebrate? And I said nothing. I said I'm an author, I'm a writer, we write books. And she said well, isn't it a big deal to publish a book? I was like, yeah, but that's become my job, it's part of my identity. Now she said, yeah, but how many books are you going to write per year? Less than one, definitely. So don't you think you should mark that milestone? And I knew she was right intellectually, but emotionally couldn't get there.
Speaker 1:I woke up the next day and I had this kind of strong realization that five years earlier, if somebody had told me I would publish one book that people would read, let alone two, I would have been over the moon and that I needed to get in touch with my past self, because the problem, the fundamental problem here, is that as soon as you accomplish something, your expectations rise, and often your expectations rise faster than your accomplishments, and so you feel like there's a gap between what you did and now what you're capable of or what other people want of you, and that makes it really hard to enjoy and savor your success. If you remember how proud your past self would have been, then you get to connect with a version of yourself that had lower expectations, and that's where the continued, that's where the satisfaction for me and self-acceptance comes from, to be able to say, yeah, you know what I made a younger version of me proud and I can feel great about that. But guess what? Current version of me is no longer content with that. And so now, what can I do? That will impress future me?
Speaker 1:And I think this idea of mental time travel, of rewinding to your past self and fast forwarding to imagine your future self, it's the best thing I know of to get the right balance of I'm happy with where I am, but I'm not going to settle. So it sounds like we need, um, we need a future self that's going to push you Really. I mean, what do you think? Have you ever done that? Like, do you, do you think about when you're 40, what, what will, what, what you'll be proud of?
Speaker 2:uh, yeah. So for me, I I I have a lot going on in my brain like I, I do want to achieve really good things, but I have one strong driving factor and that is, for some reason, to try and help people. I don't understand why that is, but that has made me really want to work hard. Like Khushan knows, on this project I do work really hard and on things that I find interesting and useful I work hard. But there is something in your book that really interested me. You said you need to seek discomfort. So it's not the things that I like doing that I should be working hard at, but the things that make me uncomfortable. Could you explain the discomfort Well?
Speaker 1:I think you can do both. But but before we get to that, I think this is really interesting because we just did a little motivational interview, like I'm asking you what your 40 year old self is going to want and you're telling me here that I really love to help others, and so I think a big part of then overcoming what you're calling laziness right, or maybe challenging yourself a little bit more, is being very clear about what impact you can have and who you're going to help, and knowing that that is what motivates you. Well great, don't work on things that don't help other people, because you can expect that you're going to be less driven and less disciplined. I think that's a great lesson. I don't think seeking out discomfort means that you have to not enjoy what you're doing. So I'll give you the personal example on this.
Speaker 1:So, public speaking, I was terrified of it. I literally I was physically shaking when I would walk into the classroom, when I would get on this. So, public speaking, I was terrified of it. I literally I was physically shaking when I would walk into the classroom, when I would get on stage. It was very uncomfortable for me.
Speaker 1:But guess what? I love sharing knowledge. I enjoy talking through surprising studies. I get a kick out of telling stories. What's especially meaningful for me is connecting with students and sharing something that might help them in their goals, and so helping others is a core motivator for me too, and so what I'm doing is I'm saying let me take something that I love to do and put myself in an uncomfortable version of it, because that's where my skills are going to get stretched, and so it would have been really easy for me to just have one-on-one conversations with students and sit down with them face-to-face, but that would have limited my impact, and so seeking discomfort was about saying, okay, let me take this activity that I like and let me scale it in a way that's not yet something I'm good at, but ultimately will make me more helpful.
Speaker 2:That makes a lot of sense. And it's really interesting the thing about the public speaking, because we have a friend, walid Khan. He was in a school shooting and he barely survived. But then he said one day he just asked his principal, like I want to do a speech in front of the whole school so people don't keep asking me what's wrong with my face and things like that. And then he said, as soon as he told the principal that he was like why did I do? But then, after he did the speech, he said everyone applauded, there's people in tears and it made him so much more confident and so much more grateful as well. So that's another powerful story Very similar to what you that's a lot more powerful than anything I've experienced.
Speaker 1:I think part of what's powerful about it is I watch this so often people kind of waiting for the moment they feel ready, like I start to feel nervous and I doubt myself. And you know, I think it sounds like in Waleed's case. He has this moment of like can I do this, should I do this? And a pang of regret follows. And then you start to second guess the decision. I think what he demonstrates and what we see over and over again, is you don't need the confidence in order to take the leap. You build the confidence by taking the leap, and it's it's usually after you've taken on a challenge that you you learn like, hey, I can do that and I can get better at that yeah, that's one of the strategies I use.
Speaker 3:For example, let's say, if it's sparring or doing boxing, difficult sports like that, I'm like the pain of missing the session is going to be way worse than me actually going into the session. And this is time and time. You know, whenever I've done the hard thing, I come out of it like I'm so glad I did that.
Speaker 1:Yes, and, and also I mean, if you miss boxing class, your sister's going to keep beating you up.
Speaker 2:That is very true.
Speaker 1:But, yeah, no, I think. I think anticipated regret is a great motivator and it ties back to what we were saying about getting in touch with your future self. Uh, because it reminds you. Yeah, you know what I might be upset today if I fail, but tomorrow I'm going to be more disappointed if I fail to try.
Speaker 3:I think that's an easier way to be also grateful, because just having gratitude without the perspective, like you said, time travel is very difficult. But I mean, I give credits to Simon Sinek. Simon Sinek told me thatc told me like that you should write things that you're grateful for start of the day and end of the day, because every day I would wake up and I would just feel miserable for no reason and I was just looking at what I don't have in life rather than what I have in life. And I feel like the perspective aspect that only comes and you have to practice it, like it only comes if you practice it. And yeah, your message, you know, resonates a lot with me. And, speaking of boxing, he's got one coming up. What?
Speaker 2:advice would you give him? I've got no experience in boxing, but I've got a boxing fight coming up.
Speaker 1:Why did you sign up for this? I don't know?
Speaker 2:no, it's just I wanted to challenge myself, make myself uncomfortable, and I've always wanted to do boxing. It's quite a fun experience. It will be, hopefully, I think.
Speaker 1:I don't think you need any advice there. I think it sounds like it'll be both fun and then hopefully you come out with a new insight about yourself that you didn't have before. I want to come back to gratitude, though for a second. Can I add something to your gratitude list? Yes, please. First of all, how often do you do them? Every night, especially every night?
Speaker 1:Sonia Lubomirsky and her colleagues have found that sometimes people benefit more from doing it weekly than daily, because when you do an everyday gratitude list, sometimes people have a hard time finding something meaningful just in a day to be grateful for, whereas over the course of the week it seems to be.
Speaker 1:You know they find something that really matters and then also you know it feels it can get a little repetitive and stale, if you know, if you do it too much, but I'm guessing there are big differences between people on that. But I want to add something to the gratitude journaling, which is Jane Dutton and I studied this a while back and we found that if you just do a gratitude journal, there's a little bit of a risk that you end up passive, because you're reflecting on what you're fortunate to receive from others and part of our motivation comes from what we give to others and feeling capable of making a difference. So we actually found that people end up more motivated after they do contribution journals, where you think about what you did for others, and so I've just become a fan of doing both, like you do your gratitude list three things I'm grateful for and then three ways that was useful to other people as well.
Speaker 3:Thank you so much for that advice. I will let you know how that goes. We also have some questions from a couple of people.
Speaker 2:Yeah, just to quickly wrap up quickly wrap up.
Speaker 3:One of them was what are you, what steps are you taking to help your kids unlock their hidden potential?
Speaker 1:oh, I'm actually trying to get out of their way. So I had a, I had a really funny moment with uh, with our 13 year old. When she was uh, she was trying to learn a new skill in a sport and I told her no question, you can do this and it's going to be great. And she said you have to say that you're my dad. And all of a sudden I realized she no longer considers me a neutral, you know, sort of coach. She thinks I'm a cheerleader and what I need to do is I need to make sure she has a coach or a mentor who believes in her hidden potential, who she trusts, to not just tell her that she's great all the time and that for me that's really liberating as a parent, because it's not my sole responsibility, to you know, to tell her what she needs to hear. One of the best things I can do is to connect her with other people that she can learn from.
Speaker 2:That's a great answer. I didn't think that's how you're going to respond to that.
Speaker 1:Me neither. It happened recently and lesson learned they did the coaching Exactly. I needed to be coached as a parent, which happens all the time. We actually my wife Allison and I have something we do at dinner. My wife Alison and I have something we do at dinner, ideally weekly, where we ask our kids what we can do better as parents and what we can work on, and we learn so much in those conversations.
Speaker 2:Wow, yeah, okay. So we've got another question from a listener. Honey Balo Marshall asked what did you mean by your tweet where you were referring to the meaning of life and you said the meaning of life is to make other people's life more meaningful?
Speaker 1:Oh. So I got this question over and over again, like what's the meaning of life? And nobody liked my Douglas Adams it's 42 answer. So, yeah, I thought about it and I've studied how people find. Well, I've studied how people find meaning and I've found that the most consistent source of meaning is feeling that you've benefited other people, uh, feeling you know that that you matter to others. And so I thought, okay, well, one one way of addressing this question is to say if you're looking for meaning, uh, instead of just trying to find it, think about how you can offer it to others.
Speaker 1:And that means usually for me. Concretely, that means when I meet somebody and I want to be helpful to them and bring some hopefully some meaning to their life, I'll ask them what's their biggest challenge right now and then figure out do I know something or someone that could help them move toward overcoming that challenge? Or what's a goal that you've set for yourself for 2024? And then what can I do to try to help you achieve it? And if I'm trying to elevate you, that elevates me.
Speaker 2:If we had longer, I'd really want to know what it is that makes you and people in general want to actually help people, but I think we'll leave that for another time. Do you want to ask help people? But I think we'll leave that maybe for another time. Do you want?
Speaker 3:to ask the next next two questions. Um, so taylor asks that we get a lot of you know gurus nowadays, um, that are like you know, some with good message, like like yourself, she really likes you, and some some basically you know, this can be they purport, I think that's the word used. So how do you differentiate what's good advice and what's bad advice?
Speaker 1:I think the first thing you do is you ask about the credibility of the source. Do they have expertise and or experience that is valid? So you know, have they made a meaningful contribution to their field? Have they lived something similar to what you're going through? I think that's the first set of questions. I think the second, the second thing you do is you get comfortable with trial and error and you say, okay, let me test out this person's advice in a small personal experiment that if it goes poorly it's not going to ruin my life. Like, don't, like, don't choose who you're going to marry, based on, you know, the advice of somebody, somebody you follow but have never met, because they don't know you, they don't know who's going to be the right partner for you. But try something small and see how it goes and then figure out what is tailored for you and what's probably worth ignoring.
Speaker 2:Okay, so put actionable steps in that they advise, but little ones, not life-altering ones, yeah.
Speaker 1:It's a strategy that Sim Sitkin has called the strategy of small losses. You run an experiment where failure has the lowest possible cost Interesting, and then the learning is safe.
Speaker 2:Okay, and then, to wrap up, our final question is from Ziauddin Yousafzai. He wanted to know how do you know about so many different sports in so much detail?
Speaker 1:I'm a sports fan. That's an easy one, I think. Well, first of all, I think, whenever I'm interested in a question, I try to go to worlds that I'd like to spend more time in, and that means I don't. I've followed mostly the sports that were popular in America, uh, growing up in the U? S, and I felt like that was limiting and there are other things I could find interesting. And so, uh, you know, I went to like, when I was I was writing um, one of the chapters of hidden potential, and I wanted to write about a human sponge. Uh, I started looking up Olympic sports that were more obscure, because I was just curious about them. And then, you know, that becomes a rabbit hole. I'm like, oh, I didn't even know. Like there are all these new coaching techniques in these sports that I've never heard of, and let me learn about those.
Speaker 1:And then you stumble onto an interesting character and you learn their story and pretty soon it becomes something that you want to know more about, and I guess for me, sports is the story of what it's like to be human. Everything that matters in human psychology plays out in sports. You know our, our ability to, to focus on what's best for our team over our individual interests, the rivalry between groups that have everything in common except they wear different jerseys. We can make a long, long list of you know of what sports reveal about life. But because of that, what that means is when I follow a sport, like I'm interested in the characters who are involved in it, like what drives them, who are they, what have they learned, what's their process, and I don't actually go to learn about the sport, I go to learn about the people, but then you have to understand something about the game they're playing.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that resonates with me. The stories are so powerful. Like Francis, ngannou is one of the UFC fighters. His story so when you look at it, where he was and how far he came just blows your mind.
Speaker 2:And on that note should we wrap it up. Yeah, thank you for coming on, adam, having this conversation with us. It was our absolute pleasure for us, and we know you took a lot of time out of your busy schedule for this. So, yeah, thank you so much pleasure was all mine thoroughly enjoyed it.
