Achieving greater things with Adam Grant

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2:00And now, on to the show.

2:06Hello, and welcome to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. So on this show, I've talked to hundreds of entrepreneurs about how they built their incredible companies and teams. And almost every single story involves confronting some unforeseen challenge, you know, by learning something new or jumping into an unfamiliar and sometimes even scary situation. Most people aren't really trained on how to tackle the big challenges that come with launching and growing a business. Most of the time, they dig deep within themselves and figure out a way forward. Well, my guest today, Adam Grant, recently wrote a book about this very concept.

2:44You may know Adam, in fact, because he's been on the show before, or maybe you've listened to one of his podcasts, Work Life or Rethinking. In Adam's latest book, Hidden Potential, he dismantles the myth that you have to be born with innate qualities to accomplish great things. And as we've seen time and again with many of the founders on this show, growth isn't about the genius you possess, but about the character you develop. What first got me thinking differently about character was this incredible study by Raj Chetty and colleagues, where they show that you can predict your income in your 20s by just looking at how many years of experience your kindergarten teacher had.

3:22I mean, that's remarkable. Yeah. More experienced kindergarten teachers end up with more successful students? How could that be? And it turned out that it was not so much an advantage of cognitive skills. you know, the early edge in math and reading, but rather a lasting gain in character skills. And there was a set of habits that you learned at age five that stuck with you and then actually explained the success that you achieved in your 20s and beyond. And so you start to think, okay, if a kindergarten teacher can, you know, can teach character skills that are visible for, you know, four, eight years later, and then maybe even decades down the road, there's something powerful there.

4:05I want to double click on this idea for a moment, right? Because as you can imagine, after interviewing 500 or more founders of companies, you see certain character traits. There's some commonalities, but fewer than people imagine, right? What do you see? I'm curious. I mean, the sort of the unsurprising ones like resilience and determination and grit. But I I mean, I think that the main one is a, and I think it's in many cases a developed ability to withstand no, right? To withstand or to see no in a different way. It's almost like how Wayne Gretzky could see the hockey puck in different ways than other players, which enabled him to be a great player.

4:48If you can hear and see the word no as a beginning and a start, then you have a huge advantage as a founder and entrepreneur. Yeah. But I wonder, you know, one of the things I do see in some entrepreneurs and you've seen this in some of your students is they have the ability to just get along with anybody to they're sort of socially comfortable. They're really easy to talk to. They're very likable. And so I wonder whether those kinds of things, I mean, you know, we talk about developing skills, right? Right. But is there a limit to how good you can get at something like that? And I mean, I mean, I, you know, I just give you an example of me.

5:33I mean, I am an introvert. Naturally, I have a job which requires me to speak publicly. I know that you also have some introverted personality traits, but and I try to fight against it. You know, I'll go to a party or I'll go to a mixer or an event for parents at the school. And it's really hard for me. And after years and years of doing it, I don't feel like I'm that much better at operating in those situations. Do you know what I mean? I do know what you mean. Yeah, I mean, here we are, two writer podcasters who are introverts who have pushed ourselves out of our comfort zones over and over again.

6:10I think, here's my hunch. So what you're talking about are social skills. And my hunch is that the reason you've become excellent at podcasting, but not at small talk is you had specific skills that you were trying to build as a podcaster, but you don't have the same clarity of focus and objective, um, when, when you go to a party, right? So like showing up at a, let's say a cocktail party at a conference, um, my nightmare, your nightmare and mine too. But guess what? Once you, once you show up, you feel like you've already done the task. Yes. The goal is just to put yourself in the situation and that, and that, That makes that a counterproductive goal because what you should be doing is saying, okay, I want to work on making the transition from small talk to deep talk.

6:58And so, you know, maybe it's a little aggressive to walk in and say like right after meeting someone. So tell me about one of the defining moments in your life. Like, nope, that was like fourth date. Too soon. Yeah. Yeah. But then to say, okay, well, what happens if I start asking people instead of what do you do? What do you love to do? And I found when I practiced that, that people, they opened up, they came alive. And then I had much more interesting conversation. So to go back to your question, I don't know whether somebody who's in the fourth percentile on social skills is ever going to end up in the 97th percentile.

7:41I can tell you that going from the fourth to the 24th is very doable and extremely consequential, both for your success and your well-being. And that it's these kinds of micro goals and personal experiments that seem to teach us the skills we're looking to learn. You know, one of the things that struck me when I was reading the book was how many times I've interviewed founders who will say something like, you know, I think my advantage was I didn't know anything about the industry. I didn't know anything about cosmetics or I didn't have any experience in food. And oftentimes, you know, it's counterintuitive because you would think, well, without that experience, how can you actually succeed?

8:20And I think I've found this particularly with younger founders, you know, millennials in particular. I think my generation, the Gen X generation, is a little bit more cautious and I think in some cases to a fault. But one of the things you write about in the book is that, you know, you don't have to wait to master something before you go for it. Sometimes you just have to dive in and just do it. Yeah, I think that's true. What happens is a lot of people try something, they struggle at it, and then they think I'm not good enough at it to put it out there. Yeah. Because it's too risky and I might embarrass myself.

9:01and what they're overlooking is that the best way to learn something is to do it. I think the clearest example of this was a pair of polyglots I met. So Sarah Maria Hasbun and Benny Lewis both finished high school, convinced that they were incapable of learning a foreign language. Benny had crashed and burned at German and he's like, I don't have the language gene. Sarah Maria took Spanish, couldn't even get a sentence out, despite the fact that her father's Salvadorian, and spoke it fluently. And she just assumed she missed the critical period. And yet, these two between them speak now a dozen languages plus.

9:46And so the question is, what was the big breakthrough? And the answer for both of them is that you actually have to practice it before you're good at it in order to develop the skill. You know, in both of their cases, they felt like they sounded stupid. So they shied away from ever using the words verbally. They didn't want to say them out loud. They were embarrassed by their accents. They didn't have the vocabulary. They were afraid of putting their foot in their mouth by saying the wrong thing. And I think, you know, a lot of people say use it or lose it. I think what I came to realize after talking to these two is use it or you might never gain it at all.

10:24And I think there's something really powerful in that to say we should start using our skills before we feel like we've mastered them. Yeah. You know, one of the things that really resonated with me, you were writing about being a sponge, right? And in that chapter, you talk about ego. And lots of people have talked about this notion of ego as an obstacle. There's literally a book called, I think, Ego is the Enemy by Ryan Holiday. Yeah. And I've seen this with the best entrepreneurs. The ones who suppress their egos or don't even worry about it, aren't sort of obsessed with this idea of dignity and pride, tend to be the ones who have the greatest success.

11:06You know, we just had an episode on the show with a guy named Isaac Larian who founded MGA Entertainment. You may know him. They created the Bratz dolls, the first doll to really challenge Barbie. And he came to the United States penniless from Iran in the early 70s. And, you know, early in his career, he had some success as an importer-exporter, but he couldn't – Wait, like Art Vandelay? Exactly. Right? I love it. But he still couldn't convince people to give him a chance. And he never, if they treated him badly and he heard no, he would keep coming back to them graciously and kindly until they relented.

11:42And eventually, you know, today he's a multi-billionaire. And I asked him about this notion of ego and pride, and I've heard this time and again. It seems to me that that is a trait that many of us have, you know, or it's part of who we are, but that it's important to fight, fight against that. or to somehow, I don't know, move past it. Is that sort of fair? I think you're onto something. I think, you know, all this discussion about ego, I think sometimes gives people the wrong impression. And they think, well, I'm going to become a Buddhist and have no ego. Yeah. You've spent a lot of time with highly successful founders.

12:26Do you think any of them have no ego? No, of course not. Of course they have. No. Me neither. I think the difference is that the ones who especially manage to have repeat success and bounce back and forward from failure and keep getting better are the ones who invest their egos in their future growth as opposed to their present comfort. And that's a really critical distinction. I've worked closely with a founder for a long time who one day was told by a junior person, I give your performance today a D minus. And what most of us do is we can't take that from an ego perspective. So it's almost like we become champion grade grubbers and we start trying to make the case that, no, in fact, I deserved an A and let me tell you why.

13:20And the law professor and conflict mediator, Sheila Heen, taught me something really valuable about this. She said, that's your first score and it's already been determined. It happened in the past. The performance is over. The judgment has been made. You can't change the first score. The best thing to do is to try to ace the second score. which is to say, I want to try to get an A plus for how well I take the D minus. And that, I think, is what a healthy ego response looks like, is to say, yeah, I'm really motivated to prove myself to this person who thinks I suck. And I know the best way to prove myself is to show that I'm willing to improve myself.

14:01We're going to take a quick break, but when we come back, more from Adam on the significance of the people around us and how they can either hinder or help unleash our hidden potential. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz. You're listening to How I Built This Lab. The holidays are upon us and businesses are hiring for seasonal roles. Everything from haunted corn maze workers to snowplow drivers. This means that people with certain skills, experience, or even a special license are in high demand and not easy to find. Whether you're hiring for one of these roles or any other role, the best way to find the perfect match for your role is on ZipRecruiter.

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16:36Welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. Here's more for my conversation with Adam Grant, the author of Hidden Potential. All right, so we learned that cultivating strong character skills has a huge impact on growth, right? But, you know, sometimes as humans, we get stuck, right? We need help. And in the second part of your book, you really dive deep into this idea of teaching in order to learn and then also enlisting other people for help rather than just trying to master something alone. Right. Can you tell me a bit more about that? All right. So one of my favorite findings in psychology is it comes out of birth order research.

17:16One finding that's pretty robust is that firstborns slightly outscore their younger siblings on IQ tests. As a firstborn, I was delighted by this evidence. My sister did not like it so much. So we know that's not a genetic advantage. What is it that birth order is doing? It turns out that firstborns spend more time teaching their younger siblings things. And that experience of teaching makes them better students. It's called the tutor effect. And one of the ways we know it is if you have more younger siblings, you get to do more teaching and you get a little bit more of an IQ edge. So I think the lesson here is that one of the best ways to learn something really is to teach it.

18:01You remember it better once you've had to retrieve it. And you also understand it better once you've had to explain it. I'm curious. And I think many of us have this problem where we have that like really just loud and disruptive negative sort of voice that, you know, that cartoon devil on our shoulder, you know, sort of shouting things in our ears like you're complete screw up, you know. And I wonder why. I mean, you write about this in the book that we are often really bad at recognizing our own potential. It often requires other people to point it out to us. I mean, I've been in that situation.

18:39I once taught a session for Air Force generals and colonels where afterward, the comments were so brutal that I wanted to quit. And I mean, that was devastating. I do not belong in front of a classroom was the overwhelming voice in my head. I certainly should not be teaching anything to leaders about leadership. and you know i was really lucky to to get some coaching from my dissertation chair who watched one of my presentations and said adam you've got to unleash your inner magician and jane knew that i had performed for years as a magician i guess it was the the first thing i did to come out of my shell as a as a 12 year old and she reminded me of two things number one that I had some latent unused skill in connecting with an audience.

19:34And two, that it was hard to believe her, but I also realized in that situation, okay, maybe she's not overestimating me. Maybe I'm underestimating myself. And guy, this is one of the things I've come to believe about imposter syndrome is it's often a sign of hidden potential. If other people have higher expectations for you than you do of yourself, it means they've seen a capacity for growth in you that's not visible to you yet. And if multiple people believe in you, it is time to believe them. So I took that and I went back to the Air Force audience the next week. The first one bombed. I only had a week then to reboot for the next group.

20:22I couldn't rethink all my content. I'd already poured everything I knew into it anyway, so I didn't have anything else to add. All I could do was unleash my inner magician. And I decided to do that by walking in and changing my introduction and trying to surprise and entertain the audience, just like I would have done if I were performing a trick. So the previous week, I was in my mid-20s. They were in their 50s, and I was trying to prove myself to them, So I had talked about my expertise and my credentials. And I threw that out the window. And I should say, they all had Top Gun style nicknames.

21:01So I looked out at the room and I saw Gunner and Striker. And I looked right at Sand Dune. And I said, I know what you're thinking right now. What could I possibly learn from a professor who's 12 years old? And then I heard a voice pipe up and say, that's ridiculous. You got to be at least 13. And everyone burst out laughing. and it broke the ice. And the content I covered was the same, but the rapport and the relationship was different because I had taken myself off a pedestal. So I'm curious as a, I mean, this, this all happened in a different context before you were a bestselling author and you were known as, you know, as, as, as who you are known today.

21:46Now in this moment in your life, when you write books that are really designed to give people a framework to think about their own lives, does it apply to you? Or are you able to be Adam Grant to yourself? Like, well, according to my research and the things I've written, I know that I am doing X, Y, and Z. Are you able to observe yourself? Or do you think that's impossible for virtually most humans? sometimes and other times. I need to take my own advice. I am not doing the thing that other people told me. No, I mean, look, this happens all the time. I remember, look, the worst part of writing Hidden Potential was I'm writing the chapter about stagnation and getting unstuck and I got stuck.

22:38And I went through a whole month of questioning whether I was going to be capable of writing this chapter. And I didn't do any of the things that I advised other people to do and that I know from the evidence. Right. I think you advised take a break or try to just do something entirely different, right? Yeah. And I didn't do any of those things because I had a goal and I'm a goal oriented person when I had a plan that I was going to finish the chapter and it wasn't working. And so I felt like I just needed to put more effort into it. And then I started beating myself up for what's that meme that I saw years ago?

23:18It's like, when you start a creative project, it's like, ooh, this is fun. And then, uh-oh, this is tricky. And then, ugh, this is crap. And then, I'm crap. And I was in the crap zone. I was like, right between this is crap and I'm crap. And it took one of my writing coaches to say, this is definitely not the draft, but you're going to figure this out to then say, okay, yeah, I've gotten stuck before as a writer. I've faced writer's block. I know that's actually a thinking block. And what I need is a fresh perspective or a new stimulus. And so I need to put this away. I need to, you know, to go and read some things and have some conversations without like staring at the problem is like looking directly into the sun.

24:09I can't do it anymore. Yeah. And I think I really struggled with self-compassion. And I was just it's ironic because I'd already written the chapter about how, you know, when when you fall short of your expectations and you beat yourself up, it doesn't make you stronger. It leaves you bruised. And yet here I am treating myself as a punching bag. Right. I mean, you write about being an imperfectionist, that actually the data suggests that people who are prepared to make mistakes and to keep moving forward, even if something is flawed, tend to perform better. The outcomes are better, which makes sense.

24:48Yeah, I mean, I think it's been a hard lesson for me to internalize, though. And I aim high on things that are important to me, but I've accepted that nothing I write will ever be perfect. And I'm willing to make mistakes and fail. Right. One of the things you write about in the book is that, and I didn't know about this study, but it's a fascinating study that you cite where essentially a group of psychologists studied tweets by basketball NBA players and found essentially that I guess the ones that were the most narcissistic, they found that those teams actually didn't perform as well as teams where the tweets by players, the starting players in the teams were less narcissistic.

25:31Yeah. And that was especially true if your point guard was a narcissist, the main ball handler. Your team is especially likely to stagnate over the course of the season, as opposed to getting better at playing together. And you can see that in games one, but also in the number of assists that are completed. And, you know, it's so funny. If you look at these tweets, what is a narcissistic tweet? One player tweeted, when I look in the mirror, what I see staring back at me is greatness. And, you know, you could imagine, I remember I did a podcast not too long ago with Mark Cuban, who I think you've also had, right?

26:11And I was curious about his take on this, you know, as a longtime Mavericks owner. And he said, listen, you can have one knucklehead on a team, but you can't afford two. And that's almost exactly what you see in the data is that having one person in a position of influence who's more interested in being the star than making the team successful undermines everyone's ability to harness the collective potential of the team. It's interesting because we tend to reward that kind of behavior in our culture, right? I mean, you see it in social media all the time. People who behave that way are often celebrated and venerated or beyond.

26:52And I mean, I don't want to cite any specific examples, but I think you know, you can imagine who I'm talking about. But at the same time, I mean, all of the research that you cite shows that teams that work collectively, you know, it's like a great rowing team that can, you know, all move in sync. They have their better outcomes. They're more likely to succeed. How do you, and I'm sure you're asked this all the time when you consult with business leaders and corporations, how do you incentivize people to work collaboratively when the incentive structures are often designed to reward individual achievement?