Adam Grant ON: Why Discomfort is the Key to Growth and Strategies for Unlocking Your Hidden Potential

26:37Springboard diving, right. Yeah. I basically ended up diving because I didn't make the middle school basketball team or the high school soccer team. And I saw a lifeguard diving at a pool one day and was just mesmerized. I want to learn how to do that. Unfortunately, I walked like Frankenstein. I couldn't touch my toes without bending my knees. I could hardly jump. Very little explosive power or grace. Not cut out to be a diver. I was really fortunate to have a coach who saw more potential in me than I saw in myself and said to me on day one, I will never cut a diver who wants to be here. And, you know, I'll put in as much as you want and as much as you put in.

27:14And one of the things I really struggled with was knowing when a dive was good and when it was improving. I felt like I needed to always aim for perfect tens. And Eric Best, my coach, one day sat me down and he said, you know, there's no such thing as a perfect ten. Wait, have the Olympic announcers been lying to me? What do you mean? The whole point of a 10 is perfection. That's the appeal of this sport. And he's like, nope. If you look at the rule book, a 10 is for excellence. So even a dive that gets a quote unquote perfect score is flawed. Wow. So then what we started doing was we set targets for each dive.

27:50And he said, okay, basic dive, like a back dive. We're going to aim for sixes. And I think that's within your range right now. And then we would level that up over time. As I started to learn harder dives, I remember when I was doing a two and a half somersaults with a full twist. I was like, let's just make the dive. If you don't fail it, if you don't do it for zeros, that'll count. And then, you know, we're aiming for fours. And so we have dive specific goals. What I've done with that sort of post diving career is realized I never had somebody like this in my life. I need a judge, not just a coach.

28:22So what I will do is I'll ask people, give me a zero to 10. How did that go? And it's very rare for people to say 10. Yeah, of course. So then, you know, whatever they say, whether they give me a three and a half or a six, I just want to know how can I get closer to 10? That's where I'm really trying to use other people's reactions as a mirror. From there, I'll ask for suggestions. But to your point, I need to make sure I'm also proud of my own progress and I'm focusing on my own principles. And so the last analysis that I do after I get the judges ratings and the advice from anybody who's willing to coach me is to say, okay, let me go back to the version of me that set this goal in the first place.

29:03Would that version of me be proud? And if the answer is no, I don't care what score I got. How do you navigate this? I'd say that I've definitely got it wrong before as well. Like I've definitely made mistakes in that where I think when I first started out, I kind of kept things very secret and I kept things very quiet. so I had started working on creating some content online and for everyone who doesn't know I had been making content offline for 10 years before that speaking to small groups of 5 to 10 people colleges after school clubs universities things like that and my parents forced me to go to public speaking and drama school when I was 11 years old so I started learning public speaking because I was a shy kid I have a very similar public speaking story to you when I was 11 years old so I wasn't born with a skill.

29:54It was something that was harnessed and developed. Except for the accent. Except for the accent, which I was born with. Yes. I can't do anything about that. And funnily enough, and I always like to clarify this, when I see TED speakers with American accents, I prefer it. Yes. Because to me, hearing from an authority in America from like, you know, Wharton or Harvard or, you know, it has magic. No, this is like wanting the Beatles to sing with American accents. No, that's different. That's terrible. No, no. British people always sound smarter. We know this. Go on. I feel the opposite way. Honestly, true.

30:26Wow. True. My Wife Radhi's cookbook is launching on February 27th. It's called Joyful and will help you cook plant-based dishes effortlessly. I'm so excited for her recipes to be in your hands so you can make them in your home for the people you love the most. And it would mean the world to me if you go to joyfullbook.com to pre-order now for an exclusive video and a daily wellness guide for free made by Radhi. Again, that's joyfulbook.com, J-O-Y-F-U-L-L book.com and you get your free daily wellness guide made by Radhi. So I developed a skill that I didn't know what I had used for. When I met the monks and studied the Gita and Eastern wisdom, I was like, oh, wow, I have a skill set that was ready to be used for this when I'd never used it.

31:21I never used public speaking or drama before that for anything meaningful for me, at least. And then I'd done that for 10 years and then I made my first piece of content online. So, but I made it in quiet because it's some of these things that you talk about here and I'm pointing these out because we can go back to it after I answer your question. I was scared of looking stupid. I was, you talk about making more mistakes, theory versus reality in the book. This is page 40. And you talk about looking stupid, feeling shame being laughed at and experiencing discomfort i was scared of all of those things because now it was going beyond my community of people like five to ten people who used to come and hear me speak i had no idea what the online world would bring i had never done that before i didn't have any friends who'd ever created any online content so i couldn't check in with someone i didn't have a coach and so i was kind of doing it in quiet and i think what was beautiful about that is I got to really construct my own voice that was authentic to who I was and was just genuine to who I was.

32:21So my earliest videos are half-spoken, half-spoken word because I loved rap music growing up. So there's, you'll hear lazy rhymes, you'll hear words that cascade together and it's inspired by what I loved as a teenager. The visuals were, I've always been into art and design and so that was very easy for me. I love aesthetics, I love visuals, I love feelings and experiences so I edited all my own videos granted the editing was sloppy because of cuts and sound which I didn't know well but it was still what was natural to me and then when I put out my first piece of video the first people to react were the people I knew and they were all like Jay you talk too fast the music's too loud well we don't think this point is that great and it was all negative feedback and I kept going because I was getting some joy from it so in the beginning it was that way i and i think i've tried to hold on to that as much as possible because as the scale grew the plethora of negativity or criticism or judgment got louder as well and i started to look at it more seriously because now you're worried about perception and image and how you think people view you and whether people see your truth or they don't and you can feel defensive and I think where I've got to now is I still get affected by it.

33:36I'm so not beyond getting affected by negative comments or challenging comments or criticisms because my monk training has left me vulnerable at some points because I have created a space in which to always allow advice to come in because that's seen as a mark of wanting to improve and wanting to be better And I've had to learn to balance that with also knowing my intention. So what I've accepted is that the only thing I can control is my intention being aligned and pure to what I believe. Not pure like in a godly way. I mean pure in what I believe. But the way my action is received will come with advice, feedback, and criticism.

34:21and all I can keep doing is keep refining my intention and hope that that will channel the effect of communication externally and no matter how perfect 10 it is, it will never be perfect and therefore there will always be criticism no matter how phenomenal an idea it is or whatever it may be. So that's me meandering around your question to that's how I'm dealing with it. I don't think that's a solution or a solve. It's how I'm mentally kind of constructing bridges and walkways to navigate how stressful it is. I think it makes a lot of sense. It also leaves me wondering, like, is there a Jay Shetty rap tour coming?

35:00But all kidding aside, although I think there would be an audience for that. I think one of the things that you're making me think about is there's a spectrum of, you know, on one hand, we have the monk ideal of either I'm open to everything or I'm not going to live in fear of social disapproval. Correct. On the other end, I guess we have the monkey reaction. We are social primates and anything that could lose status could get us excluded and this is really problematic. I don't think either is really realistic for us as humans. I think we're always going to care about what other people think. And I think my goal is to say I want to care enough about other people's reactions to learn from them, but not so much that I feel pressured to conform to them.

35:49It's powerful, wow. The way that I've tried to get to that is to say, well, I'm always gonna be disappointing somebody. So let me decide whose opinions actually matter to me. And then include myself in that group and say it's better to let down a bunch of strangers or a bunch of people whose standards are not the same as mine or whose taste doesn't match mine than it is to let down the people I care about and myself too. What you inspired for me also with that conformity idea is how I'm willing to be open enough to improve, but not see something as a reflection of my identity. And I think that's where we all struggle, where it's like when someone laughs at you, you feel like they're laughing at you, not at that particular event and moment and day or evening or improv or whatever it was.

36:42you feel you are someone who should feel shameful as opposed to that was a moment where I made a mistake. And I think that's where I think you struggle when you hear feedback or advice that you start attaching to your identity. I think that's a huge problem. And I think one of the most reassuring bodies of research that I guess speaks to this from the book is the overblown implications effect. The idea that when people see you make a mistake, they don't actually attribute that to your incompetence or your lack of character like you think they do. So, you know, you watch somebody, you know, take a really crappy photo and their thumb is in the frame and you don't immediately think that person is incapable of being a decent photographer.

37:27Like, that was a bad photo, right? It was literally a bad snapshot and it's a snapshot of a bad snapshot. So it's a meta bad snapshot. You know, I think somebody, you know, is trying to cook and they they burn whatever's in the oven. You don't immediately think they're a bad cook. You think, oh, they, they got distracted or they, you know, didn't have the right recipe or this is the first time they're trying that. And I think we're really good at recognizing that in others. We, we, we don't sort of leap to conclusions that they're inescapably, hopelessly flawed and that they're failing makes them a failure.

38:03But I think in our own self-talk and our self-assessment. We do so much of that. Like I screwed this up. I am a screw up and everyone else is going to know it. Yeah, so true. And it gets really dark. It gets really, really dark. I'm so glad we went then. Thank you for asking me to reflect on that too, because I'm always trying to find better pathways mentally to deal with these things that you have to navigate on a daily basis. I think we all are. And I don't think you need to thank me for wanting to learn. Well, let's talk about that. I love this diagram that you put in the book about how we think learning happens versus how it actually happens.

38:40And I think that idea of so how we think learning happens, I'll explain that and then you can explain how learning happens from your words. Adam shows in the book this diagram that says knowledge leads to comfort, leads to practice, leads to progress, which is how we think learning happens. And I think so many of our beliefs around learning do come from school and do come from even for me. learning happens in that I learned something now I know it fully and now that rule stands forever and I think modern day learning isn't that at all like I don't know any rules that have completely stood forever and apart from obviously certain mathematical or scientific rules of course but most rules in business most rules in marketing most rules in sales most rules in even a relationship they change they mold they grow and so I think that fixed approach approach is hard to shake because you were always told at the end of it well you got the wrong answer so it was always about the answer and it was always about well if you knew the rule you would have got the right answer and today we feel i'm not getting the right answer so i must not know the right rule but that we're not finding that so however reflect on that and then guide us through the the principle you're right we have a kind of had this ideal in our heads that i'm going to reach mastery and then I'm done.

39:58Yes. It's a version of what Tal Ben-Shahar has called the arrival fallacy that, you know, I'll hit my destination and then everything will have changed. And the reality is when you reach mastery, you don't freeze at that moment. You have to keep evolving your knowledge and skills as the world around you evolves. And I think what that leads a lot of people to do is to spend far too much time trying to get to the point of mastery before they ever really try something. You know, from the book, I saw this really clearly in examples of language learners. I mean, how many people do you know that just concluded in high school that they're incapable of mastering a foreign language?

40:34You? Yeah. What languages did you take? So we did French and German from year seven, so 11 years old till like 14. And if we did well at those, I got to do Russian. So I actually studied Russian for a year and I could read, write and speak for a whole year. It was really great learning. And then I never got to practice any of those languages. And so they all fell away. And then by the time I went to college, I had already lost touch with all of them. So French, German, and Russian were the ones I studied the most. Yeah. And so it sounds like you actually did experience some progress, but then it didn't stick and you weren't able to keep it up.

41:08Yes, exactly. Yeah. So I think that's pretty common. I think maybe even more common is the, like, I don't have the genes for this. I'm missing the foreign language gene or I miss my critical window. If only I had, you know, if my parents had raised me bilingual or if I had started an immersion when I was four, everything would be different. I met two amazing language learners when I was doing research for the book, Sarah Maria Hasboon and Benny Lewis. And they both concluded after high school that they were incapable of learning a foreign language. Sarah Maria could not make it through Spanish.

41:44And her father speaks fluent Spanish. Benny, I think, just had a disastrous experience with German, also with Irish. And what's amazing about the two of them is that combined, they can speak a dozen languages fluently today. Wow. A dozen languages fluently. Conversationally, even more. So they're polyglots. They're people who not only talk, but think in multiple languages. They're effectively self-taught, and they've picked it all up in their 20s, 30s, and beyond. It's amazing. So what I wanted to know is what can we learn from them? Not just about language learning, but about any kind of learning because they are professional learners.

42:21And my biggest takeaway from talking to them and also juxtaposing what they do with the evidence is that language classes are broken in a lot of schools. Because basically what happens is you learn a vocabulary and a bunch of rules of grammar, and then you're taught to more or less just write it down. And very few schools do extensive practice in speaking, which means that you never learn to actually talk in the language, which means you're not using the language. And you don't practice enough to really master it. What Sarah Maria and Benny recommend is start speaking from day one. Literally the first day you're picking up a language, you start talking in it.

43:01And what will happen as you do that is you're going to make lots of mistakes, but through using it, you're going to start to internalize it. And in fact, one of the things we know from the research is when you make a mistake, you're more likely to remember the correct answer because it really sticks. You're like, oh wait, I screwed that up last time. Let me now change it. So I think the broader lesson here is that to go all the way back to the diagram, I think a lot of people want to wait to use their knowledge until they've acquired it. Oh, wow. It's not how learning happens. The way learning happens is you got to use your knowledge as you're acquiring it.

43:31And that's how you build it. And that's a virtuous cycle. oh my god that you know it's so interesting i don't think i've ever heard that put that way i i feel like i've just and it's resonated so strongly with me because as soon as i met gronga who's the monk that i spent time with as soon as i met him i had no qualification but i went back to college and started telling everyone about what i'd learned and then i'd go back and spend time with him and go learn more and then come back and just teach whatever i'd learned and there was no i didn't have any qualification to teach. I didn't, I didn't understand it fully, but it was like, it was so much more fun that way.

44:06And I allowed myself, I gave myself the permission to say, I'm just going to teach what I learn. I'm going to teach what I learned up until now. I don't have to speak beyond my level of realization or reflection, but, but I'm learning this. I'm fascinated by it. Let me share it. Yeah. I mean, that's, that's a higher level version of, you know, of learning by doing it's learning by teaching. Yeah. And so often people like to say, well, those who can't do teach. And I would, I would edit that and say, no, those who can't do can learn by teaching because exactly as you found, uh, when you explain something to someone else, you remember it better and you also understand it better.

44:43And I actually think anything you want to learn, um, a lot of people are trying to figure out what is generative AI? You could, you could go and take a class in it. You could go tinker with it. I would say go teach a class in it or get a group of people together who are also interested in learning it. And each of you take a module to teach to the rest of the group. And that's when you're really going to internalize it and start to master it. Yeah, I love that. I mean, I'll butcher it now trying to say as well as you did, but. Yeah, because you always hurt for eloquence. No, no, but that idea you put so wonderful.

45:18Jay Shetty, bad talker is a common, that's actually a meme. I don't know if it's made it on your radar, but like this guy's incoherent. We never understand a word he says. He's just babbling constantly. No, but that particular statement, I love that idea of how we're always waiting till we've mastered something, till the end of something, to feel like we can play, share, do. And so there's a few things. That is well put. Yeah, that's exactly right. I'm trying to get to the end of the line. And then I'm like, I will have made it. And now I can demo it. And now I can teach it. Yeah. And I think that making something public is so horrifying because the reason why we struggle to go teach a class on AI is because we're scared we're going to be asked questions that we don't know the answer to.

46:05And actually, you're spot on. That is exactly the best way to learn because you'll be able to say to all those people, hey, I don't know, but I'll find out for next time or I'll email you the answer, whatever it may be. and I find that, but we haven't created space for it to be okay to not know. No, I think that's right. And there's actually some work on this in psychology, which shows that when an expert expresses uncertainty, they actually end up becoming more believable. In part because people are surprised and then they listen more carefully and realize, wow, this person does know what they're talking about.

46:38I don't think that permission should only be granted to experts. I think, in fact, the less you know, the quicker you should be to say, I have no idea. And it's really ironic that only the people who know the most often get to the point of feeling secure in that knowledge to be able to say, yeah, I have no clue, but let me do some research on that and come back to you. And I mean, I felt this as a teacher. I felt like, especially in the major public speaking anxiety days, early career, I felt like I had to be able to regurgitate a study for every single question that came up. I can imagine. I thought that was my job.

47:11And I was really missing out on the joy that students get and also that I get of saying, I've never seen anyone explore that before. I think that would make a great dissertation. Have you ever thought about coming to a PhD program? And I don't know, I think part of the joy of learning is that every answer raises at least nine new questions. And I think that we close that off when we expect people to always have an answer. Yeah. You've mentioned a few times and even in your diving example, the need for a coach, you know, I feel like therapy culture has and is still slowly penetrating. Like we, I think if you're in the circle, you think of it as like really accessible and easy and it's a big deal.

47:50And not stigmatized. Correct. And the truth is it isn't across the board. It's getting there. It's slowly becoming destigmatized. I think the idea of finding a coach is so, unless you're an athlete, it seems so far as an idea or as a thought process of how you approach things. I know there are executive coaches that have definitely kind of got into the zeitgeist, but still finding a coach is quite an alien approach. I find that people have their stigma there. There's confusion there. There's a lack of understanding of what is a coach. How have you thought about it, seeing as you've mentioned it a bunch of times in the book and today?

48:24Well, I think we're actually comfortable with it in certain domains, right? So no one would ever hesitate to say, all right, I want my kid to learn the piano. They need a piano teacher. So I think when it comes to hobbies and skills early in life, everybody knows they need a coach to learn the basics and then move toward intermediate and then hopefully figure out if this is something they want to pursue further. I think where it starts to become a little uncomfortable is when you're an adult and you think that you should be able to teach yourself everything or you want to be self-reliant, not dependent on someone else.

49:01And I think that's a broken mental model of a coach. A coach is actually, I think a good coach is trying to work him or herself out of a job and say, obviously, I'm going to give you lots of advice and I'm going to try to help you improve. But at some point you should internalize the way that I look at your performance, the way that I think about helping you make progress to the degree that you can figure out what would I say after this and then apply that advice. And at that point, you're probably ready for a new coach who has different knowledge and skills to share with you. And I think that's where I would start is I would say coaches are all around us.

49:32Going back to the asking for advice idea, you ask people for advice, you start to turn them into your coaches. And there's no reason why you can't formalize this. A lot of, and you're familiar with this, a lot of writers have writing groups where somebody is working on a manuscript and then four or five other writers are basically coaching them and trying to help them improve it. I don't think that should be limited to, it has to be my job or it has to be the hobby I'm trying to improve at. I think anything you want to get better at, you could just ask for somebody to give you informal coaching and then you learn really quickly, is this person's perspective helpful to me in this domain?

50:07Absolutely. Absolutely. Do you have a coach? I'm looking for one right now, funnily enough. That's why I asked you. On what? I think for me at the moment. Now we know why you were asking, how do I figure out what to grow on? Yeah, exactly. And I think there's that feeling for me about, I'd say if I really worded it accurately and clearly, it would be I'm reintegrating and renewing and refining my values because my life has changed so drastically. And so there were times when I felt like I had kept up with the pace of my external growth. And then all of a sudden I was like, oh no, this is way bigger than I thought it was.

50:50And this is so different from how I lived just 10 to 15 years ago. And I want to realign and reconnect with that, if that makes sense. It does. And so I think that is something which I've given myself personal time to do regularly, to refine, to realign, to reconnect, but to do it with someone else who can see beyond and maybe has had experience of two very opposite worlds and has traversed those paths may be really helpful. And so I think that's what I would be looking for. And so coaching would be the right modality for that. I'm Radhi Dvlukia and I'm the host of a really good cry podcast and I have the opportunity to talk to Logan Uri.

51:33Logan is a dating expert, a behavioral scientist, a best-selling author and someone who is seriously changing the way we think about love and dating. In our conversation we talk all things dating that Logan has studied and tested from what to put in your dating profile, the pictures you should and shouldn't be using to the conversation starters that actually work and the huge no-nos that people probably do not realize are reducing their chances of success on apps. Whether you're single, dating, or just trying to be more intentional in love, Logan offers the kind of clarity we all need. Relationships do require work and the best relationships are people who really work on them together.

52:09They're so focused on if I find the perfect person, then I'll have the perfect relationship instead of understanding really that they can choose someone great and then build that relationship together. They don't need to keep searching for perfection. Listen to A Really Good Cry on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts? I think it could be. I think it's interesting. There are two levels of that that I think could be fruitful. The first one is exactly the way you framed it, which is, let me take a step back and figure out what my values are and how my core principles in life have changed, should change moving forward.

52:44That's what it is, yeah. But I think the other layer of it is saying, maybe the values are the same, but your opportunity set has evolved. So what does it mean to live your values now, given those opportunities? Correct, absolutely, absolutely. There we go. I've got a few candidates for you. I'll suggest them offline. Please, I genuinely love that. Yeah, no, and that's definitely been where my head's been at probably the most, most recently. And again, I usually sit with something like this and let it simmer and let it clarify. And it's nice in a forum like this to be able to vocalize it in an articulate way.

53:17And that's another beautiful thing about talking to someone else about it. If you keep going around it in your own head, chances are you won't say it as articulately as you would say it to someone else because you wanted to make sense to them. That's one of my favorite things about conversation. There was a biographer once, it was E.M. Forster's biographer. She used this beautiful phrase called inverse charisma, which was the idea, she said, Forster had this ability to ask you such insightful questions with such sincere interest that he brought out a more insightful, more charming version of yourself than existed.

53:54I'm like, that's part of what a good coach is. I actually think great coaches are filled with inverse charisma. They're not giving the rousing halftime speech all the time or the pep talk. They're not always necessarily kicking you in the butt to try to get you to work harder or persist longer. I think what they're doing is posing challenges and ideas for you that bring out a better version of you. Yes, yes, I couldn't agree more. And I think that is what hidden potential is. I mean, someone is not planting potential. It's not manufactured potential. It's not inception potential. It's hidden potential.

54:30It's there and someone's helping ask the question so you can keep revealing and peeling away the layers. And I think that is exactly what a good coach does. A good coach is not telling you who you are or telling you the answer or telling you who you could be. It's allowing you to discover that for yourself, which is needed for someone else to do that because otherwise you're just stuck in your head saying, I'm not that. I remember I had a coach years ago when I'd left the monastery. I was working at Accenture in London. And he'd always say to me, you're an entrepreneur. Just from watching you, I can observe that you're an entrepreneur.

55:01And I'd be like, no, I'm not an entrepreneur. I don't want to be an entrepreneur. And I said, I would fight and debate that with him. I would give him all the reasons. And he said, Jay, one day you'll see. And now I look back and I think, wow, I was, that is exactly who I was. Not in the way that it may be seen in the world, but the autonomy, the the wanting of being artistic being a leader wanting to create wanting to produce without with freedom and without restraint like all of that quality of an entrepreneur i think language is so limiting too it is yeah right yeah you're right if you if you had defined entrepreneurship back then as as being someone who sees opportunities and then creates a vision and then builds around that without giving up a ton of freedom like yeah of course that's who i am and instead you're like i gotta be i don't want to run a startup like that's that's what in my head i was like i don't want to manage people like i don't yeah yeah i gotta be pitching a scrub daddy on shark tank yeah yeah that's what you think yeah i don't want to start a business like that's not you know that's not what i want to do with my life and so yeah it's fascinating our language limits us and i was i was going to ask you that about that like how do you feel comfortable and this is chapter three of your book the impact imperfectionists finding the sweet spot between flawed and flawless how do you allow yourself to release anything when you know it's going to be flawed and imperfect because i think that that's the challenge right with the book especially with social media less so it's it's short form and short term so there's it's easier to get to what you want to get to but with a book with a talk with a obviously as a professor i mean everything you're teaching, you know, people are going to practice it for years, potentially.

56:41How do you feel comfortable putting something out that's imperfect and incomplete? This is a little embarrassing, but I have to say, so I, after writing the book, I said, all right, I want to, I want to use some of the psychometric tools that we were trained in to create a fun quiz for people to identify what their greatest character strength is among those. And then also an area for growth. So I finished the quiz. I sent it out to a bunch of people to pilot it. And then it was time for me to take it. And after writing this whole chapter about what I've learned about being an imperfectionist, my lowest score was imperfectionism.

57:17So I am not fully recovered from perfectionism. And it's sometimes hard for me to release things. I think what's helped me is a couple of things. One, the calibration of saying, okay, if it's something as big as a book. I mean, I'm aiming for a nine. I'm going to pour a lot of time into it. Hopefully, a lot of people are going to engage with it. And so I really want it to be as good as I'm capable of doing at that moment in my life. If it's a social media post, I'm content with a six. And some people might get angry at me. Some people might misunderstand me. I'm definitely going to learn something.

57:50And it's better to put out a bunch of potential sixes and hit some eights than to post once a year. As somebody who cares a lot about both sharing knowledge, and learning from other people's reactions to those posts. I think that's been really helpful. And I guess what I've realized through that is if you never put anything out into the world, then you're actually limiting your contribution. And I think when psychologists study regret, it's pretty clear that in the short run, people are afraid of failing, but in the long run, they're more afraid of failing to try. And that's kind of where I've come down is I'd rather fail than fail to try at all.

58:28It's really fascinating. you said something there which which i really resonate with is this idea that part of the learning is in the sharing and seeing reactions and i think we underestimate like i could honestly sit down and think i know everything about a subject and keep quizzing myself and think i know everything but the moment i share with someone else and they ask a question i'll be like oh i should have you know that that was missing i didn't think of that and so sharing it in some form, even if it's not the complete form, but sharing a talk based on one of the chapters or sharing. I often do that with podcasts.

59:02Like when I have an idea, I'm like, let me just record a podcast episode about that and see what people have to think about it. And it's a great way of just experimenting and testing and seeing what part of it I didn't consider. Yes. Because someone will consider it. And we don't see that as part of the growth process. We see it as separate. We see it as I'm going to make something complete. People are going to have exactly the reaction I want to it. And that will be the success of it. Yeah, I think that's right. I think the medium also matters. So podcasting is a much more forgiving medium, I think, than book writing.

59:31100%. Because nobody expects you to have said everything exactly right in the moment. Whereas a book. Yeah, if you say something wrong in a book, it's like, well, shouldn't you have done your research? Why didn't you fact check that? One of the things I see a lot of people hold back on when it comes to sharing anything they've created is so many people limit themselves by saying, I don't want to self-promote. I'm so glad we're going here. Let's go there. This is not about me. I'm like, good. Because there's a huge difference between self-promotion and idea promotion. Promoting yourself is saying, look at me, look at how great I am.

1:00:06I'm special. You're sharing the awards you've won. You're posting a lot of selfies. You're in the spotlight. I think idea promotion is really different, which is to say, I made something I'm proud of. I hope it's valuable to you. I hope you get some joy out of it. If you don't put that out in the world, you're depriving people of benefiting from what you poured your heart into. And that, that to me seems like a mistake. Yeah. Did you always feel like that was something you had to wrap your head around? Because that's something I definitely had to wrap my head around. So I'm intrigued. No, I, because as a professor, I just don't imagine putting a book out and promoting it.

1:00:42Like that doesn't come naturally. Like that doesn't feel not at all. Yeah. No, I remember a few weeks after I got tenure, a colleague wrote and said, hey, I'm thinking about writing a book about motivation. You've done a lot of research in this area. Do you want to co-author it? Wow. I love working with this collaborator, huge admirer of his work. This is a great honor. And I've always wanted to figure out if there's a way I could share my ideas more broadly than just with the students I happen to meet in the classroom. I immediately, I had a lab meeting later that day with a group of undergraduates, and I told them I was going to do this.

1:01:15And they had a mutiny. Like, no, you cannot. You cannot write a book about somebody else's ideas. You need to write your own book. I was like, nope, can't do it. I cannot do that. This is like, I don't feel comfortable doing it. I hardly even teach my own research in the classroom. I want to share with you the knowledge that I've found most useful. Like, I don't think my research is like the most important thing for me to teach you. And they pushed back really hard. And they said, look, you have a responsibility. if you've invested a lot of your own time and energy in the work that you do, to share that more broadly and get it out there and see what people think of it.

1:01:53And they basically held me hostage. They said, you're not leaving this lab meeting until you agree you will write your own book before you help somebody else do theirs. And eventually the logic bullied me into agreeing. And I kind of came around and said, okay, this is what we do. we don't create knowledge for it to collect dust in academic journals or for it to only be available to students who are lucky enough to get into an Ivy League school. Like that's not right. I believe in democratizing knowledge. So yeah, I'm going to do this. Book came out a little bit beforehand. I sent an email to my network just saying, hey, you know, I wrote this book.

1:02:30If you find it interesting or useful, would be really grateful if you would help spread the word. The responses were so lovely. But I got one email that kind of crushed me in the moment. And it was from an academic colleague who said, Dear Adam, love the book, hate the self-promotion. This was my fear. And I thought about it, and I ruminated about it. And then it hit me. This is not self-promotion. It's idea promotion. This is about the knowledge contained in the book. I went out of my way to cite a bunch of, you know, a long list of researchers. Later, I was told too many. I was trying to synthesize a body of knowledge and get it out there.

1:03:10And we have to be to a certain degree in the spotlight in order to promote our work. And I think, you know, people want to connect to the author, the narrator. And so there's, I think an amount of self-disclosure that's required, but self-promotion that does not have to happen. And, and I looked at the book and I said, okay, the main things I've shared about myself are mistakes I made, times I failed and what I learned from those. So I feel okay saying this was idea promotion, not self-promotion. And that's for me, the litmus test ever since. So that, I guess that's how I landed at that distinction.

1:03:44It's such a interesting thing for any artist, any creative, any academic, any, any person who feels that they've come across something worth sharing. And that's why I've always been a fan of anyone who has anything worth sharing, because there are so many, I think, isn't Ted's, what's Ted's tagline? Or at one point, it was ideas worth spreading. Ideas worth spreading. I like sharing better. I don't want to assume that every idea should be spread, but share it with someone and let's find out. Yeah, sharing. And I think we all have ideas worth sharing. We have insights worth sharing of some kind, and especially if you're an artist creator academic and i think for me it was it was very very similar journey to yours and it's so interesting to hear that academic circles and spiritual circles can often have the same habits of behavior and for me when i wrote think like a monk which was my first book the biggest thing i was trying to do and what i learned in my second book which i if i would have known in my first book I would have done this is kind of explain this thought process where I tried to do it intuitively in how I shared it as opposed to explicitly spelled it out whereas now I'm much better at explicitly spelling out what I'm doing I did that to honor all monk traditions so I studied lots of different monk traditions I spoke to lots of different monks and so it wasn't just the tradition I studied in so that was very important to me because I believe that there There were traditions beyond mine that would have values to share and important messages to share.

1:05:11The other thing that I tried to do in the book was I definitely have always wanted to make ancient wisdom accessible, practical and relevant. That has always been my mission because I'm trying to speak to the 18 year old kid that I was in London before I got into spirituality and meditation and mindfulness. I'm not trying to speak to the person I am now or someone who's already learned a ton. And so to me, to make it simple and accessible and relevant was my biggest goal and always has been. And that can often come with the critique of you're watering it down, you're oversimplifying it. This isn't the truth in the way it should be shared.

1:05:52And the other thing was similar to you. And I love that you said that too. I never shared an enlightened experience in the book. All the experiences and mistakes there when meditation went wrong, there me being envious, they're me judging people they're me wanting to get what the monks have without having done the work like all the stories that the the human experience of a kid from london who doesn't have the qualification to be where he is in this space trying to make sense of it and and and so the book was it wasn't think like me like that was in the book it was called think like a monk like i'm not a monk anymore and i want to show us how we can think like monks but not live like monks and i think it was really interesting to me just our again it comes from our preconceived notions on ideas language having baggage and thoughts where people just oh but you're not a monk anymore so how do you teach that and this isn't your life and it was so interesting to me that we couldn't learn from things that were things i'd learned and gained as opposed to if you're not exactly that thing anymore then you can't teach it i i think there are things you could study that that you don't have to share.

1:07:00If you were just really fascinated by painting or rare coins, you could say this is a personal interest of mine. And it's just, it's my own curiosity. I think you and choosing to be a monk, me and choosing to be a psychologist, we chose to take a deep dive into the mind and human behavior. If we gain knowledge from that, it feels like it's selfish not to share it. Like, why would you keep that to yourself? why should the wisdom of monks only be accessible to monks? Absolutely. It doesn't seem right. Yeah, it doesn't seem right at all. It feels like taking away. It feels selfish. And also to honor those people.

1:07:35To me, the book was honoring these amazing people that have done it for their whole lives and studies of people who've meditated for 40 years. And, you know, that's not me. And I just find it interesting that, yeah, it's fascinating. And there's a great book by Austin Kleon called Show Your Work. Yes. And I really like it. And I recommend that to anyone who's struggling with showing their work because it's exact and i love the way you've differentiated been self promotion and idea promotion and i really hope that that stays with people who are listening and watching because if you have an idea that you believe is worth sharing and worth helping people and supporting people please don't hold on to it like please don't hide it from the world because i worry for us to only be exposed to the same three ideas that everyone's exposed to because we hide away from all these other new ones.

1:08:21Sometimes I hear people hold back for another reason, which is they're afraid somebody is going to steal their idea. And Austin Kleon wrote about this in Steal Like an Artist, another book of his that I found very thought provoking. My response to that is, you know what, it is possible that somebody will steal your idea. Most of the time that won't be intentional. But what psychologists have sometimes called kleptomnesia, where you misremember an idea as your own and forget the source, that can happen inadvertently. You hear an idea, you know, you don't necessarily track where you learned it. And then, you know, it kind of bubbles up a month later and you think you thought of it.

1:08:59I think that can happen. Ideas can get stolen on purpose. They can get stolen by accident. What I always want to say to people who are afraid of their ideas getting stolen is, if you have one big idea and you're afraid of putting it out there because you think someone else is going to steal it, you don't have a lot of ideas. And people who generally succeed with ideas are people who are constantly generating ideas. And so what you should do is you should generate a whole portfolio of ideas. And then you're not identified with any one of them. You don't feel attached to just one of them. And then the risk goes way down.

1:09:33Yeah. There's so many blocks that we could talk about, whether it's... And I mean, one's the ego, right? So the self-promotion is almost like an inverse ego. So it's almost like we think we're better because we're not promoting an idea. It's like we're doing, right? Yeah. That is ironic. Yeah, right? Like it's like, I think I'm better because I'm not monetizing or democratizing or popularizing and publicizing. Yes, yeah. Popularizing or publicizing an idea makes it better to not do that. You talk about the ego differently, but let's talk about in that category first of all. Like it's interesting how that's seen as a holier than thou kind of approach.

1:10:16And I don't think either is holier. I just think that one's compassionate. And to me, that's more what it is. Like I think when someone shares an idea about an experience that I could never have, to me, that's just compassion. It's their compassion to share it with me. I mean, there's no reason why people can't have multiple motives behind their behavior. Of course. I actually do. I mean, almost always do. All of us. Yeah. Me included. I think it's very rare that people are conscious of all their motives or willing to admit to all of them. But I actually think the most sustainable route to unlocking people's hidden potential is to try to align their, you know, their personal aspirations with social good.

1:10:57And I don't think there's anything wrong with saying, yeah, I want to promote this idea, both because I want it to help other people and because I appreciate people respecting my knowledge and considering me a credible source. I actually think it would be problematic if you're like, yep, I care nothing about my own reputation whatsoever. like only character matters to me. And even if people think I'm an idiot and I'm dishonest and I lack integrity, like as long as I know I'm a good person, that's good. Like that's just not functional in the social world. And so I think we should give people, this is another, we need to give people the space to say, yes, like I do, I do want to be valued and appreciated for things that I think are important.

1:11:41And I want to add value to other people too. Oh, I'm so glad you Yeah, it's so important. It's so important to allow ourselves that too. Like, yeah, do I like it when someone leaves me a nice review on the podcast or the book? Of course I do. Yeah, I love it. It feels great. And do I do things because they make me feel good? Yes, I do. And at the same time, it comes from a place of wanting to do good in the world and wanting to spread ideas that will help people and serve people and support people and hopefully help them transform their own lives. And it comes from both of those places. I want to do things that make me feel good and do good in the world.

1:12:16Like I think that's, I don't know any other way, actually. I don't either. Yeah. And I don't know how to live in a world. If I only tried to do good to others, I would automatically feel good from that anyway. but if I was only to do things that were only good for me, I don't think I'd be satisfied either. No, I mean, you'd lack the purpose that so much of your work concentrates on. What was the thing you found most surprising when writing Hidden Potential about Hidden Potential specifically that kind of you were like, oh, wow, I didn't, I'd never thought I'd find this. I think the first one was, was the idea that learning character skills can be more powerful than learning cognitive skills.

1:12:51Assuming that you have a foundation and, you know, in, in thinking skills, that learning to embrace discomfort and become more of a sponge and accept the right imperfections, that that could fuel more growth than if you're an entrepreneur, learning finance and marketing, stunning. And that you can learn those skills in your 40s and 50s, as opposed to thinking that those character skills are set when you're young. That I found liberating and encouraging. So that was a surprise. I think maybe a bigger surprise though, just as I think through the insights that I picked up as I was investigating. I think I had this image of people who, you know, not just achieve greater things, but achieve the greatest things.

1:13:33I had this image that they just figured out how to make the daily grind just tolerable. I would think about Steph Curry just, you know, drilling over and over again to shoot as well as he does. I assumed that he just figured out how to not mind the monotony and the boredom and the exhaustion, and he would just power through it. And he had a superhuman ability to tolerate extreme amounts of discomfort. Light bulb, while reading the research on deliberate practice, was like, it's not that motivating for a lot of people to just do the same activity repetitively over and over again. If you're Steph Curry, shooting is fun, like doing wind sprints and then trying to make baskets when you can hardly breathe and doing that over and over again, like not anybody's I joined, like not my idea of joy.

1:14:19And I don't, I don't think it's Steph's either. And through the research I read and through spending time with, um, with his trainer who designed this set of routines that had really elevated his game, I realized that deliberate play is a huge part of practice and we don't give it enough credit that, you know, if you're Steph, you play a game to see how many baskets you can make in a minute and a half. And then you've got a target to shoot for and you're competing against yourself or you're competing against a clock. And all of a sudden that supercharges your motivation, especially in the summer when you're not actually playing basketball games that really count.

1:14:55And I looked at that and thought, why do we have to turn the daily grind into such a grind? Like, yes, there are times when we all have to push ourselves, but pushing yourself day after day is not a sustainable routine. And what we want to do is try to figure out how to redesign practice and skill development so that you could break skills down into these enjoyable pieces and then make them more playful. You mentioned Dan Coyle. I love the culture code. And one of my favorite ideas that he wrote about was the difference between shallow fun and deep fun. I think shallow fun is gamification. It's tricking people into enjoying practice, even though they don't really like it because there's a carrot that's being dangled at the end.

1:15:32I think that deep fun is about saying, we want to actually take the process of learning itself and make it enjoyable. And so, you know, the Steph example is a great one, but it's easy to think about that in basketball. Evelyn Glennie, a percussionist, saying, like, let me figure out if I could harmonize Bach on a snare drum. Like, what a cool way to make learning percussion playful. And I think that was a big aha for me. I think that I had come to see play as a reward for finishing my to-do list and mastering a skill. And now I realize it's got to be on the to-do list and it's got to be part of learning a skill.

1:16:09That resonates so strongly as well. Again, it's like, yeah, the process has to be fun, meaningful and fulfilling in and of itself, not just the reward. Trying to think about activity that I've done that with that just felt impossible to do it with. Have you, what was the thought experiment that you did there? Well, I was wondering, I feel like monks are often misunderstood as complete denial of any earthly joy. Yes. And I don't see how a human could ever function in that environment. So I guess the question is, you had to do a lot of hard stuff as a monk, especially I imagine in training. How did you make that playful?

1:16:49You made it playful by laughing at yourself. Like it was, right? So the thing that came to mind was often we'd walk down a path and we'd be asked to find a new stone. And the goal was to find something and be really present with it and be aware of its colors, its texture, its shape, everything you'd want to practice through a mindfulness practice. And what the mind would do is I'd find a stone for today and I'd find a stone for tomorrow so that I didn't have to do the same activity tomorrow because we want to make things easier mentally. and we're always trying to cheat the system or you know break the game so my mind would do that very naturally i'd find two stones all right saw that one where that is behind that tree today i'll pick this one tomorrow i found one anyway and then we'd get to the next day and the teacher would say all right today we're trying to find a petal like and they just switch it up on you and you'd laugh at your own mind like you'd find it hilarious that your mind was trying to game the system but the monks were too you know they already were one step ahead of you they already know that Cheat codes are already built in.

1:17:49Exactly. And so I think things like that where learning to laugh at yourself brought play. When you saw the monkey mind, as you mentioned earlier, you laughed at it. You didn't, you went harsh on yourself. You didn't, if you saw a monkey, and I've seen monkeys do this in India, steal people's sunglasses, cut bags if you're holding it to grab fruit. Diet Coke. Yeah, Diet Coke. And then they chug it before you can do it back. Stealing, I've seen them steal credit cards like out of people's hands if they're paying for something. You don't look at that and go, what an idiot. Like, what's wrong with you?

1:18:20You just think, oh, monkeys. And you just laugh. And that's partly what the mind is like. Like, it's funny to watch the flawed mind and not take it so seriously and recognize that it's just how it's built and how it acts. I like that a lot. That's what came to mind. Yeah, I mean, I think the idea of, you know, of taking your goals and your growth seriously, but not yourself and your ego that seriously is obviously powerful there. It also sounds like your teachers really appreciated the importance of novelty and variety. Absolutely. And saying, all right, we got to switch up stones for pedals just to keep making this interesting and make sure you don't lose your curiosity.

1:18:58Yeah. And just recognizing that you were going to, you know, I remember saying to one of my teachers once, I was like, I was like, oh, you know, I'm just really struggling with my ego. I don't think it's ever going to go away. It's so big. It's so hard to deal with. I see it come up in so many scenarios. And they just were like, relax. Just, you know, it's OK. Like your ego will always be there. just do your service like it wasn't seen with as much like kind of pain and stress because they understood it's hard they get that like they know what the mind is going to do and so why would they react to it with this like very serious and kind of imprisoned undertone rather than like yeah it's going to be there just do it anyway i i like that idea of just just do it anyway it's going to be there do it anyway like okay so you might feel you have too much of an ego to give a give a talk do it anyway and be aware of it right be aware of something and do it anyway is far better than wait till you overcome your ego to do something like that you'll be waiting for the rest of your life it will never disappear and that's just ego it could be anything obviously like envy or any of the things you mentioned i don't know that it's realistic to expect it to disappear altogether i think what you want is not at all you want it to be in the rear view mirror so that it's not your primary focus but you're you're checking in on it every once in a while exactly Adam there are so many things in Hidden Potential we could talk for hours and hours and I don't I want people to actually read the book I want people to pick it up I want you to go and grab a copy of Hidden Potential The Science of Achieving Greater Things as we've talked about today there's such a need for progress there's such a need for growth I think this book breaks it down makes it simple in a way that I love and I admire but on top of all of that it's packed with great stories case studies science and research to back it all up and in Adam's signature style of making it fun the natural humor that always comes through.

1:20:42But thank you for doing this. And I wanted to ask you, Adam, is there anything you haven't shared either from the book or that's come in your mind and heart that you're like, Jay, I really want people to know this or share this. And it may not be, but I want to give you the floor. Ah, that's, well, you're as always too kind. No, I mean, the only thing is I'm second guessing. I'm like, was that the most surprising thing? Should there have been a more surprising thing? I am right now failing my imperfectionist test. It doesn't matter which one I picked because no one knows what the alternatives were.

1:21:11But I am curious. So we talked about deliberate play being, you know, potentially as important or more important than deliberate practice for growth. The other two that I was just starting to think about were that when you get stuck, you often have to move back to move forward. That before people leap in a skill, they have to dip. That was an aha that I did not have before. Yeah, that it's better. You were talking about climbing the mountain. The idea of like, yeah, like that it's better if you're stuck, not just to stand there, but to walk backwards to kind of - And find a new route. Yes, yes, yes.

1:21:42Or a better method. Actually, most of us don't move backwards to move forwards. We remain stuck because we're too embarrassed to move backwards or we feel too, like we've reached somewhere to move backwards. There's a comfort. I don't want to give up the gains that I made. Yes, yes, that's exactly it. And so why would I start over when I've already put so much time into getting where I got? That sunk cost bias is, that was huge for me. I remember learning about that in like A-level economics, like 18 years, 17, 18 years old, and thinking what a great concept to understand that. And I kind of gave that up very naturally, but I saw that as I grew older, people who'd studied something, especially something, I had friends who would become lawyers or doctors, but then didn't enjoy it or didn't see that as their path directly even.

1:22:26And having to pivot from that was so hard because you've worked so hard to achieve something that is rare and hard and difficult. Yeah. One of the things I would like to remind my students of when they come to office hours and they're in tunnel vision, like I have to do the prescribed thing. My parents want me to be a doctor or everyone in my family went to law school. I always want to say to them, listen, I understand that you're already down this path. Like you've done the pre-med thing or you're already in the program. but what's worse realizing that you wasted the last two years or going on to waste the next 20 it's not a hard calculus and so i think maybe the antidote to some cost is opportunity cost to say yeah you know what you have already invested a whole bunch in this but think about all the growth and all the joy that you're giving up on if you don't shift gears yeah yeah i think i mean i think about that all the time in my own life and it's hard because you never know it then and it's the old Steve Jobs quote of you can't connect the dots moving forwards you only backwards yeah only backwards and it's hard to remind people almost as their future self and I think that is the activity that's what I did I I fast forwarded when I was working in the corporate world I fast forwarded 20 years and I asked myself would I be happy doing what I see other people doing 20 years ahead of me and the answer was no and so I was like well then anything will be better than this because if the answer is no and it's not that they had bad jobs or they weren't happy it's that i wouldn't be happy doing what they were doing 20 years from then and so if you're not then you can't keep following the same path adam i actually have two more questions from you that i just saw my notes that i i actually don't want to miss asking these to you this comes from part three systems of opportunity opening doors and windows and i had these two questions that i think are really interesting we talked about certain challenges of our school system and what we find wrong but this was the interesting part for me do you believe children should be able to choose what they study um i think that's a really fascinating concept one of my friends runs schools where kids do get to choose uh it's private and uh i'm always fascinated by this idea of we've gone from living in a world that kids had no choice we naturally swing to the other side of the pendulum where we want to give kids all choice.

1:24:46What did you discover? I think this is really complicated. So the research on the paradox of choice suggests that there is such a thing as too much choice. First of all, there's a lot of debate about how pervasive that is. It's much worse to have no choice than too much, much worse. So it's easier to manage the problem of too many options than it is to create freedom where it's absent. I think that's clear. The second thing is we can think Think about bundling and sort of bucketing choices in a way that maybe gets the best of both worlds. So I think it's potentially helpful for students to have choices within constraints.

1:25:22For example, so you ask, if you're an elementary school teacher, you ask kids to read 30 minutes a night, but they get to pick the book. I think that's the kind of choice we're looking for early on. I think later, probably in high school, every kid should take some math, but I don't think everyone needs to take trig. Like trigonometry has never been useful in my life. In a heartbeat, I would throw out the trig curriculum and replace it with statistics, which I think actually is useful for how people think and what they do in the world. But not everyone would feel that way. There's no cognitive benefits of doing trig either.

1:25:54Like are there no, because I often think about things not being as literal and think, oh wait, is my brain developing by thinking in that ways? I have never seen a randomized controlled experiment saying that learning trigonometry will teach you a set of thinking skills that's invaluable. Like I don't think there's anything about sine and cosine that you would get that you can't get through geometry. It would be my hunch as a psychologist, but I have not done that experiment or that series of experiments. I think, but what I would say is like within, I mean, colleges are much better at this, right?

1:26:21Saying there's a math requirement, but we give you a menu of options and you can choose within that. Nobody wants to go to a restaurant and have a menu with a thousand options. But if they kind of know what they like, they can say, I can look at that category and I can choose within it. And I think that's where I would want choice to land for kids at different levels. Yeah, and it's so hard to, you know, hidden potential as a kid and as we grow is so difficult because if I was asked what I liked growing up, now I can easily say that I think I was naturally drawn towards the arts and design and philosophy.

1:26:54and I can see it even more clearly now, but it would have been really hard for someone. I don't know, how would you be better at spotting hidden potential in schools and in young people earlier on so that we can kind of hopefully better guide and coach people as opposed to have them become pre-meds or complete a career and then having to pivot? Well, I think the person who's best suited to see your hidden potential is often the one who knows you best. And I don't think we give teachers enough opportunity to get to know kids. I love the research on looping that I wrote about in the chapter on what we can learn from countries like Finland and Estonia.

1:27:32But even here in the U.S., there's strong evidence from multiple states with millions of students in elementary and middle school that if they just happen to have the same teacher for two years in a row, they achieve more gains in math and reading, which is remarkable. And I know there are tons of parents who are afraid of this idea. Like, what if my kid gets stuck with Professor Snape for two years instead of one? That's the end of the world. It turns out that not only is it good for kids to have the same teacher for multiple years, but that when kids are struggling and teachers are struggling, they actually benefit more from the extended relationship.

1:28:07And I don't think it's hard to unpack why this is. I think when a teacher moves up with a student, they don't lose all this information in the handoff from one to the next. They understand the students' strengths and opportunities for growth. They also have seen the distance that the student has traveled. And so instead of just saying, well, like a new teacher, well, that student didn't shine in math, to say, wow, that student was really behind in math and now is right on track with the class, I think there's some hidden potential there. I think every school on earth should let kids have the same teacher for multiple years.

1:28:43And I think it's not a huge effect in the data, but I think it's a meaningful one. It is one of the biggest. I mean, even in spiritual education and teaching and guidance, that's the only way it works. Like the practices that my monk teachers created for me were very different from what they created for other students because it was all about specific learning and specific growth. And so some of the practices I did were not normal for others. And some of the practices other people did were not normal for me because you trusted that your teacher was getting to know you better and therefore would create plans, whether some of that included travel.

1:29:18For example, I would be asked to travel back more to London to teach while I was a monk because they saw that that would be a useful skill set for me. That would be a useful experience for me of me going back to the country I was from and having to connect there. and that wasn't part of everyone else's training. And so I've always been a fan since my training in that way of having the same teacher. And even till this day, I still go back to the same monk teacher who knows me much better. And now he has like so much data on me because he's known me since I was 18 years old. And so he has 18 years of insight of knowing me and many of those years living together where his ability to say, oh my gosh, do you remember when you used to be like this and this challenge would trip you up and look at you now.

1:30:05Like, you know, and just that context is so useful to hear from a student. Like you're saying, like whether it was, hey, you know, you were struggling with math last year and last year you got C and this year you got B. But I actually noticed that, you know, whatever, I think it's huge. I actually think it's huge. And that's a great coda to the earlier point about you want a coach to work themselves out of a job. But then you want to be able to go back to that coach at inflection points for a fresh perspective or for somebody who has that continuity. And so I think over time, the hope is that you don't rely on that person day to day anymore as a crutch, but they are the person who I guess has the most accurate mirror.

1:30:43Yeah, absolutely. And that's at least from a Eastern philosophy point of view, education was always meant to be the guru as it would have been called at the time and a small enough class for the guru to get to know the class well enough in order to spot hidden potential and their psychophysical nature and their dharma, word for purpose, in order to ignite that spark deeper. And that requires a lot of training for the guru and an openness from the students as well. But yeah, you're right. It's not just choice as well. It's not just like, hey, choose what you want. Yeah, it's beautiful. Thank you so much, Adam.

1:31:21This has been amazing. Thank you. Always a joy. I love how our conversations go from what's wrong with the school system to why we're not idea promoting enough all the way through to, you know, how do we choose what we need to work on? What is a weakness? What are imperfections? And again, it's all inside this book called Hidden Potential, The Science of Achieving Greater Things. Highly recommend it from Adam. We'll put the link in the comments and the caption for you to get it. Thank you so much, Adam, for doing this. I appreciate it. Thank you, Jay. It's been a joy and also a privilege. And I think we've never spoken other than when we're recorded.

1:31:55Yes. We need to do a little bit more of this, I think. I would love that and appreciate it and welcome it. Thank you so much. Thank you. Yeah, thanks, Adam. If you loved this episode, you'll enjoy my interview with Dr. Daniel Amen on how to change your life by changing your brain. If we want a healthy mind, it actually starts with a healthy brain. You know, I've had the blessing or the curse to scan over a thousand convicted felons and over a hundred murderers and their brains are very damaged. This is an iHeart Podcast.