David S. Yeager on the Science of Inspiring Young Minds EP 499

28:53A lot of parents then make that worse, right? Because they are yelling at kids in sixth grade, you need to take practice seriously because if you don't, you'll never get looked at by scouts. And that's just for admission to regular college, usually with no scholarship. And then you add on top of that, the chance to be a gymnast who can have a huge following online and make lots of money selling green juice or whatever the products are. Then it creates a kind of economy in which there's a lot of pressure. And I think that's the negative side of it. Where does the distress come from? Well, we know from from psychological perspective, one thing that makes you feel the worst is social comparison.

29:30So anytime you have something that's good, but somebody else who you think is like you has something a little bit better, then that tends to decrease your enjoyment of whatever it is that you have. And so the classic example is a lottery winner who wins a$2 million ticket, but here's about someone who had a$20 million ticket. So they're unhappy with their$2 million in winnings. Right. So this is Dan Gilbert research from 20, 30 years ago. And you can think of that social comparison process happening at a more rapid rate than maybe ever before, in part due to the access, the internal lives of successful people through social media and the news and just the intrusion of cameras and recordings into the daily lives of the wealthy and successful.

30:13successful so social comparison i think is a big part of it and that's a tricky one so i think that for a lot of people who young people who want to give up technology i think a big part of it is they feel like they're wasting too much of their time comparing themselves to people they could never live up to and that's killing their happiness and i think they're right about that another thing is to say all right well there you have a choice you could say well this is all a dumb rat race that isn't going anywhere. And I'm being lied to by the grownups about how I should invest my time. And so I actually shouldn't be striving, that it's all kind of a fake game.

30:50And you hear that a lot. You hear it at almost every level. I hear PhD students say that about academia. And there is a back, going back to Thoreau and Walden, there's a reason why that's a kind of American tradition of saying, let's get away from the constant striving. But there's another version of it, which is, all right, well, the reason I'm striving is because I have a purpose. And it's not just about me and my economic future. There's also something that I might be able to change and improve around the world. And my skills are going to be valuable and essential for that. And I think a lot of people who have a positive stress response, it's coming from their belief that their striving has a value and a purpose that's bigger than their own long-term self-interest.

31:38So I think the flaw in a lot of the argument I've laid out so far that makes stress seem inevitable and depression and so on seem inevitable is that some of the most meaningful things that bring the most enjoyment to our lives are also the hardest. And the reason why they're so meaningful is because if you can accomplish them, then you've stood out in some way you've gained a reputation as someone who has something to add some value to the world and that feels amazing the idea of earning some valuable prestige and reputation is among the best feelings in the world for anyone let alone for a young person who doesn't have much of a reputation to stand on and so the interventions that we often do are less about escapism, right?

32:30Or suppression. So we're not saying give up on all your challenges or you're fine, just suck it up. We're not, so we're not saying discard challenges or suppress negative emotion. Instead, we're usually recommending what's called reappraisal, which James Gross's term is very simply like reframing, in this case, a negative emotion, like stress as an opportunity to A, do something that matters to you, B, as a sign that you care enough about something, that you're willing to strive for it, and C, maybe even that stress is a resource that you can use. And so we've published a series of experiments where with young people, even in the middle of the pandemic, they were more likely to show better stress responses in their cortisol and their heart rate, not heart rate, but just their cardiovascular vascular system, heart rate among the factors that goes into that.

33:24But in general, show better bodily stress responses, better psychological stress responses, lower anxiety, and ultimately higher pass rates in school. When they've negative stresses as a positive sign that they're doing something important, as a sign that they can grow and learn, that's their growth mindset, and also as a resource that when, for instance, your heart is pumping blood through your body, or your heart rate's going crazy, it's actually getting more oxygen to your neurons and to your muscles to help you perform better. Well, David, thank you for explaining all that. And as I was going through the book, one of the core concepts that you go into after you've gone through the background that we just went through is this whole concept of the mentor mindset.

34:12How does a mentor mindset differ from the more traditional approaches to mentoring young people that we may be familiar with? Yeah, so we came with this idea of a mentor mindset after saying, all right, well, if you take all the stuff I just told you about, what it would be good for a young person to know about themselves and to help them cope with the stresses of the world. Then the question is, all right, what kind of leader do they need to get them there, to help them view a stressor as an opportunity, to help them have optimism in the face of difficulty, et cetera. And the most obvious thing based on the previous literature would be to say, all right, well, the leader needs a growth mindset.

34:58But Carol Dweck and I looked at a lot of the data on leaders' own personal mindsets. And what we found, along with Mary Murphy and others, was that the extent to which the leader believed in a growth mindset on their own. So in that case, it would be I'm a teacher, for instance, and I think my students can get better at math as opposed to I've got some super talented students and other non-talented students would be a fixed mindset. The extent to which a teacher, in that case, believed a growth mindset doesn't necessarily translate into the student feeling and experiencing the growth mindset culture.

35:36And a reason why was because you could think students could grow and learn, but you could have the wrong theory, like intuitive lay theory in your mind about how to accomplish that growth. One kind of wrong lay theory is what we call an enforcer mindset. This is the idea that young people are fundamentally like undisciplined and their risks to themselves and to society. This is the kind of grows from this view that teenagers lack a prefrontal cortex and they're going to follow their impulsive whims for whatever short-term pleasure that they can dream up. If that's your view, you might think, yeah, sure, you could grow and learn.

36:20But the only way you're going to grow and learn is if I impose strict discipline to stop your kind of impulsive teenage brain from pulling you in a million directions. And so that enforcer mindset indirectly leads to a fixed mindset culture because you sit there thinking, all right, well, if I don't control everything you're doing, you're going to get out of control or take advantage of me the first opportunity. and so you adopt this kind of authoritarian stance and practically in a let's say in a classroom what that looks like is a teacher might assign relatively impossible work and then provide you with no support or no flexibility to do the work and you're supposed to learn the hard lesson that you have to use self-control that's what teachers say that in their minds but students perceive it as all right well this is impossible and my teacher's not helping me accomplish it therefore they're trying to sort me out of the class and that's experience is fixed mindset to the kids so one kind of wrong attitude is this enforcer mindset idea that we've seen again and again and importantly you can have an enforcer mindset and still care about kids because you you just think that's what they need that's the way to overcome their impulsiveness and immaturity.

37:42A second intuitive but wrong idea is what we call a protector mindset. And this is the idea that young people today are so overloaded with stress and worry and trauma, etc., that we can't possibly expect very much of them. And because we can't expect very much of them, then if I care about young people, I need to lower standards. Because if I maintain high standards, they're going to lose confidence. They're going to wither away and feel less and less like they can do anything and their stress will overwhelm them. And so again, you might say, sure, a kid could learn. I have a growth mindset about them, but they can't learn like the hardest stuff because if they try to, they're going to lose it.

38:31They're going to crumble like a house of cards. The protector mindset also prevents a teacher's growth mindset from translating into a real growth mindset culture. And it does so because teachers are very friendly and supportive, but have very low standards. Now, what's interesting, what kind of no one had figured out before we did this work, is that those are two very different ways to have a fixed mindset culture. One is very high standards, very low support. The other is very high support, very low standards. and with enforcer being the former protector being the latter but both end up kind of implying a fixed mindset culture to a young person whether it's a manager a boss teacher professor parent so the alternative to both of those is to have very high standards very high support and that's what we call a mentor mindset and that ends up communicating authentically a growth mindset to young people.

39:31In a mentor mindset, your basic idea is that young people aren't incompetent, so they're not incapable of using self-control, and they're also not incapable of managing stress, which, and that belief in young people's competence, therefore, undermines the most problematic belief that's underlying the enforcer and protector mindsets. But, and so not only do you think in a mentor mindset, hey, young people can do great stuff, but also they can do it if they have the appropriate supports. And oftentimes those supports are me and my relationship with them. But it's also what are the policies around learning from mistakes and being able to improve things and how you can come to me for help.

40:13So we discovered really through a long process of argumentation and looking at inconsistent data and studies that kind of didn't line up. And then finally, we have this aha moment that if you want to be a leader that creates a growth mindset culture, what you need is this enforcer mindset. Sorry, this mentor mindset that's high standards, high support that pushes back against the classic enforcer mindset and the classic protector mindset. I'm going to jump to chapter four, where I think you have some great illustrations of moving away from this enforcer mindset. And I'm picking this on purpose because I'm going to talk about Steph Akimoto, who you have focused here.

40:58And for me, this is a firsthand experience because I have met Steve Ballmer multiple times during my career. The first time was when I was at Lowe's and I was in charge of all software development. And he came to Lowe's for a meeting with myself and our CIO because at the time we were the only retailer of our scale in the entire United States who wasn't running their point of sale systems on Microsoft. And he wanted to understand why. And I remember Steve is a big guy. And I remember him coming into this room and he tried at the Lowe's headquarters to use intimidation to get us to change our strategy and to buy a Windows operating system.

41:50And we stood our ground because the reason we were running a Unix operating system was because Windows was crashing all the time at all the other retailers. And we had the most stable point of sale environment of any retailer. But I remember how upset he was when we refused to entertain his thoughts, plus the costs were going to be exorbitant. The next time I met him was when I was a senior executive at Dell. And I remember I was working for the president of consumer at the time, Ron Gehrig's, and we were working on the rollout of what could have been a very successful launch of Dell's mobile products.

42:34And we wanted to go on the Android. We had the option of going Windows, but we knew it really wasn't an option because at that time, 2009, 2010, Microsoft was having a lot of difficulties penetrating the mobile market. So we had all our plans to go on Android. He comes out to visit us and in a meeting with the executives that I observed, again, went total screaming machine, basically tossing things around, talking about what would happen if we didn't go with the Microsoft product. And then he had a private meeting with Michael and that's what ended up happening. So that was my second interaction with them.

43:21And then the third was, as I was leaving Dell, he requested that I interview to become the CIO at Microsoft. And so I went there and did probably 14 interviews of the company. And this was around 2011, 2012. And it was just such a toxic culture. Everyone was afraid, especially the younger employees. And that's what you describe in this chapter. And I was hoping maybe you can take it from that background and what Steph was experiencing to what ended up happening when Satya Nadella came in, which is, I think we will look back in business schools and say it's one of the most impressive turnarounds that there's ever been.

44:05Well, first of all, I'm glad you weren't like, I read this chapter and I thought Ballmer was a sweet peach and he was always the kindest person ever because I interviewed a ton of people, but you never know exactly if you're getting the full story. It's just reassuring that my reporting matches with your observations. And look, I'm not trying to demonize any one individual leader. And obviously my presumption after having talked to lots of people is that Bomber used the approach that he thought was going to be most effective on behalf of his company, that he was trying to do the right thing and so on.

44:35And what I argue in the book is that, look, there's a worldview in which that bull in the China shop approach is the unfortunate but necessary reality that if you fundamentally believe that all business is a kind of dog eat dog, ruthless, winner take all type of environment. And furthermore, that anyone who isn't on board with your vision for whatever is happening is in some way short-sighted, like they just simply don't see reality, but reality clearly, or if not short-sighted, actively thwarting your vision of the world. If you think that's the only reason why someone wouldn't use your product or go along with you as the manager, then it makes sense to intimidate them if you have the power to be the alpha dog.

45:29So what I try to do in the book is to go away from the conventional business pop psychology book where someone's got a pet theory and then you just find one exemplar and you're like, see, this proves my pet theory. To instead say, what if Balmer himself is actually the product of a worldview that he didn't realize was only one of several ways of viewing the world. And once you think of it that way, then it's like, well, huh, maybe I as a manager am sharing in the Balmer worldview and I could have been Balmer too, right? Because like now you look in 2024, you can look back on some of the things he did and say, that's barbaric.

46:12I can't believe that HR let him get away with this stuff. And some of the stories I heard are young employees, especially engineers in the early 2000s coming into a meeting talking about a product maybe the predecessor to the zoom or the early windows smartphones and then they would just get berated and yelled at for not knowing the answers to whatever questions the executives had and that the term i heard from a lot of people was flipping tables that they were there were more than one occasion in which a table was literally flipped over by an executive during a pitch meeting or a proposal meeting from a young person, especially young engineers.

46:54And the idea, of course, was the leaders are saying the work's not good enough. It's not to our standard. And you need to be afraid enough of disappointing us that next time you actually meet our standard. Right. And you can see why people do. That's why parents yell at their kids and teachers threaten to send kids to the principal. It's a reasonable tool of control that has been around us throughout all of human history is yelling, telling, blaming, and shaming, right? Flipping tables mad. And it's meant to be a deterrent for poor performance. And what I want to argue and what I try to do with the story of Steph is to say, well, that comes from a specific worldview that doesn't have to be everyone's worldview.

47:36And so just to get back to that point, let me just back up and tell you who Steph is. So Steph Akimoto is many people would consider Microsoft's best manager over a long period of time. She was recently plucked away by ServiceNow and owns manager excellence at ServiceNow, a large technology company as well. But when she was hired at Microsoft around 2000, around the time that Balmer and his culture was starting to take over, she was disgusted by all the toxicity. And she encountered this flipping tables culture and also encountered a management philosophy that's been called Rank and Yank that comes from General Electric, GE, during the Jack Welch era.

48:23And for younger listeners who maybe don't know Jack Welch, but maybe have watched 30 Rock, Alec Baldwin's character is meant to be a caricature of Jack Welch and his personality from the Tina Fey show 30 Rock. So Jack Welch was well known for this policy called Rank and Yank. And the basic idea is that every six months or a year, all the employees in different units would be ranked compared to similar units. And then some bottom proportion, let's call it bottom 20%, bottom 25%, would be either fired or given a warning that they're going to be fired next time that they're in that bottom proportion.

49:03The highest group, that might be five, might be 10%, depending on how they did it in a given year, would be given a lavish bonus or reward. And the middle group was given very little and basically told if you're not on the path to being in the top, that eventually you're going to be in the bottom. And this sounds meritocratic, sounds like, all right, well, it's a business, you got to reward the best people. But when it ended up happening is that like in Steph's case, her unit was over-performing compared to any other unit. She was because she was an excellent manager and she was in the software testing division.

49:38And they might be ranked compared to somebody else who's in an entirely different division, but just conceptually grouped together. And then her group of over-performers would have to be ranked compared to other groups that in generally were worse. And so some of her people would be told, hey, you're in the bottom 25%. Whereas in other groups, neighboring groups, they would end up with a lot of people who'd be told their top performers when they're actually not as good as Steph's worst people. And so that created a sense of injustice in her mind, and actually in the minds of lots of other managers who've interviewed over the years.

50:17And the wide scale effect of this was not, it turns out, to motivate great performance. What ended up happening instead is that within groups that were ranked compared to each other, employees started withholding information, sabotaging each other's products, being duplicitous, lying to people about how good their presentations were, hoping that they would get yelled at and get table flipped whenever they presented. So that way you can end up ranked higher than this other person and get the better bonus. And also in that era of rank and yank, you have enduring kind of public failures like the Zoom or Bing, whereas a lot of the best engineers were going over to Google where they could ride a scooter and get free M &Ms and Odwalla juice all day.

51:00So it was just this lost decade, it's been called by Vanity Fair, where the top talent in engineering ended up going to fun places like Google that had different kinds of cultures and leaving Microsoft. What's interesting is that Steph's reaction to this initially was to overcompensate. And I asked Steph, who again, it's one of Microsoft's best managers. And I was like, what's the rookie mistake you made early on? And she said, it was trying to become more friendly with my employees and let them know that I cared. And I did that by not constantly critiquing their work, which sounds reasonable from a certain perspective.

51:40But what ended up happening is some of her direct reports who she really cared, ended up being surprised by their poor performance evaluations, and then getting blindsided and getting put in the potential fireable category for rank and yank. It's called stack ranking. And that ultimately harmed their careers. So she ended up harming people she cared about, rather than protecting them. And so Steph adopted a very kind of like brutally honest style about performance, but it always centered on, first of all, a care for the person and their contribution. And second of all, a path to increasing their promotional velocity.

52:19So a good example is if she had an employee that might be underperforming, where she knows they're going to be potentially put in the bottom category, she would have a conversation saying, all right, well, we can't control the last quarter or the last two quarters, but you can control your narrative going forward. So what's something above and beyond that you would like to do, or you might have to learn a new skill and push yourself where six months from now on your performance review, we can say, A, you turned it around, but B, you're one of the top performers in the whole unit. And so they would collaboratively create a plan for doing something impressive.

52:55So in the software testing team, it might be going over and actually talking to the engineers. And rather than just waiting on some report that goes to the engineers saying this feature doesn't work, instead saying, all right, well, let's fix this feature now proactively ahead of time before it ships to clients. So that way there's a better user experience. And now as a manager, Steph can tell someone to do that, but that person might feel that's impossible because the engineers are going to hate me. They're not going to listen to the testing group. So Steph would use all of her power and influence to basically protect the young person's right to go have that conversation where they could then earn the reputation as someone who's being super proactive on behalf of the customer and the product by working with the engineers.

53:43She would never have the conversation for the employee, but she would talk to the engineering manager and say, hey, let my person come talk to your engineers. So it's like permission to be in the room to earn a high status reputation was a big part of what she did. She called it basic blocking and tackling. So this happens throughout the first decade of the 2000s. And then when Balmer steps down early in the second decade of the 2000s and Satya Nadella takes over, he very quickly realized that there was this toxic culture. And Mary's written about this too. But in his book, he said, we had a bunch of know-it-alls and what we really needed was a bunch of learn-it-alls.

54:22So being willing to learn anything and improve. And so Satya brought in some great people, Kathleen Hogan and others, and they said, we want a new culture in the organization. But what they quickly realized was that you can't just declare by fiat that you have a growth mindset culture, right? Because a lot of people will interpret the stereotype of growth mindset of just telling you to try harder and they won't authentically create that culture. And the other big part of the problem is that it's like our old growth mindset in school problem with Carol and I in our national experiments. A kid could have a growth mindset about their own ability.

55:01But if the teacher creates a toxic fixed mindset classroom where the math teacher is like, all right, half of you don't have the talent to be AP students, so I'm not going to teach you. If that's the culture, then the kid's not going to really profit from their growth mindset. Something similar could be said of managers and their direct reports, especially young employees. So Nadella and his team quickly realized you can't just hire for growth mindset in the young engineers and then set them up with a manager who has been given financial rewards for 20 years by being the most toxic and monstrous fixed mindset leader.

55:36You need somehow a training program and an incentive scheme and an evaluation program for the managers that helped them create a growth mindset culture also. And so they came up with this idea of model coach care. So the manager needs to model the work. They need to coach someone rather. So not the kind of coach that, not the Belichick that's you're bad, I'm cutting you. It's more like the shooting coach that helps you improve your technique over time. And then Steph was the main proponent internally for this word care. And you can just imagine a bunch of table flipping bomber people saying care like that's nonsense.

56:15We're not going to beat Apple by caring about people. Steve Jobs didn't care about anybody. He just stared them in the eyes until they wilted and did what he said. And so that's what we're going to do. But Steph was very adamant that care doesn't mean low standards. She had learned from her early experiences. Care means I care enough about you that I'm going to tell you proactively where you can improve and do basic blocking and tackling so that way you can go out and earn a reputation as someone that goes above and beyond. So she defined care in this mentor mindset way. And that became the core philosophy that's won all these awards for the best management philosophy in technology recently.

57:02And then by its peak, and Steph, among many others, was a part of this, she would never take all the credit for it. She would take credit for what she did, but she would never say she did it all. But by the end of this transformation, they were the number one employee for young people, better even than Google. So it really was a big flip and it's very impressive. It's pretty incredible. They went from a decade before Satya joined where none of the talent from Silicon Valley wanted anything to do with Microsoft to now it's again the hottest place for people to work. Totally not. So many people going there.

57:38I've experienced the stack ranking myself. We had it at both Lowe's and then Dell. Michael was also a keen observer of what Jack Welch did. He even brought in our chief financial officer from GE who really brought in a lot of the practices. Part of what I observed when I was there is we were trying to reinvent the company, invoke a lot of change. What ended up happening was with this force ranking, if you fell in the bottom 15%, you basically were losing your job. And so many of the long-tenured employees were at that point in senior leadership positions that they were taking care of their own.

58:25And so people who were really hindering us from moving forward were being protected in this stack ranking. And people who were being brought in from the outside to try to bring the new change in and add new perspectives were stack ranked very low and forced out. In fact, when I was there, the average tenure of a new vice president was under six months. And it just made for a very difficult environment to try to alter because of the mechanics and how it was set up. Appreciate what you're saying. It's a whole philosophy. And first of all, that's super interesting. And I have a thousand questions for you, but I often think about the stories my dad would tell about being at the University of Texas, where I'm now a professor in the 1970s.

59:12And he was a science major. and so he would take bio, bio organic, organic chemistry and it might start with a hundred students and he might have and they would grade everything on the curve so he might have an A on the first two exams but those students who got C's, D's, and F's would drop the class and every single test they would lose more and more students who are CDF and then redo the curve So by the end, he would be one of the top 15 out of 100, but he would have a C because he's always, you're moving farther and farther down the rank. And by the end, he's like, maybe I'm just dumb at science.

59:50But you're the top 15 % of science students at a top university. You're not dumb at science. And that's something similar that happened in a lot of these companies that copied the Jack Welch approach. It's like optimizing for the top 1 % or 2 % that are ridiculous superstars. But if you have 180 ,000 employees, it's not clear that's the best way to run your company. And then over time, it can end up being pretty toxic and undermine things. Absolutely. Well, David, I just wanted to quickly go through section two of your book. You go into mindset mentor practices such as transparency, questioning, stress, purpose, and belonging.

1:00:28And I was hoping you could quickly just walk through all five in a succinct way to give the audience an understanding of how the mentor mindset attacks each one of these? So first of all, thanks. I love the opportunity to go through this and I will keep it short in terms of, all right, what does the public think each of these means and what does it actually mean to do them? So the whole second half of the book revolves around the idea that as I was telling people about this mentor mindset framework, people like Steph and other great teachers that I write about and parents and so on. They'd say, all right, well, but maybe these managers and teachers and parents are just preternaturally disposed to being outrageously great at mentorship and leadership.

1:01:16Maybe they're like Athena from the Odyssey, where they just spring forth from Zeus's skull and then become capital M mentor that spends 20 years with Telemachus and helps him along his way. and I can't be that because I have other stuff going on. That's the main response I often get. And what I found is that actually, no, there's concrete stuff that all these mentor mindset exemplars do and that anyone else can do. And so if you're a mentee listening to this or watching this, these are things you can look for as you decide, who do I want to be my manager or my mentor? And if you're a mentor, these are things where it's like, all right, I don't have to be the Greek goddess of wisdom to be a good mentor.

1:01:56Here are some concrete things I can start doing right now, and they can have an impact. The first of them ordered in the book is transparency. And the idea there is you just need to explain what you're doing, basically your standards and your high support, a little bit more than you think you need to. The reason why it's pretty simple, if you assume young people are mostly talked down to, that they're grown-splained all this information all the time, then they're coming to our relationships with them with baggage. And they're going to presume the worst of us as leaders, unless we're super transparent about what we're doing and why.

1:02:34So maybe you're already a leader that tries to have high standards and high support. But what the person is seeing, what the mentee is seeing is just our high standards. The first practice is just to explain, hey, I'm providing you this feedback, for instance, because I have very high standards and I believe that you can meet them. Anyone can do that. You can do it with just a few words. Make it a habit. The rule of thumb is say something transparent about your intentions about three times more than you think you need to say it. The second one is questioning. So one thing I saw a lot is that mentors are very tempted to explain everything.

1:03:11Again, I use this word groan-splaining. The idea is that I, the 30 or 40-year-old, have thought through what's good for your future. And if only you would listen to me, then you would make wise choices, right? It's like middle school health class. Right. And that's our default approach for working with young people. When you look at the great mentors, the great exemplars I've found, they ask questions three to four times more than they tell information. So great mentor mindset teachers, the kid says, hey, is this problem right? They say things like, I don't know, is it? And insecure mentors like, yes, it is great.

1:03:47Good job. Way to go. You tried hard. The great mentor mindset exemplars hardly ever provide direct feedback and they hardly ever praise for getting right answers or even for effort. It's almost always questioning to put the impetus back on the young person to do the thinking. The great basketball coach I followed, Chip England, isn't telling you how to fix your shot when he's fixing Steve Kerr's shot. He's not just telling you. He's asking, he's like, how did that feel? What went wrong for you there? He's making the player have a coach in their head. So questioning is a second practice. And there's some very specific routines that I've seen work and that anyone can do.

1:04:25Next is stress. So suppose you're in a world in which you're pushing people to their limits and they're going beyond what they thought they were capable of. Well, they're going to feel some stress. And in our society, the normal message around stress is give up on that. Don't do it, as I was saying earlier in this interview. And that worldview that Ali Crum calls stress is debilitating ends up being pretty bad for young people. It can make the stress worse. It can also prevent them from leveling up their skills. So the very simple practice is to use what we call the stress can be enhancing mindset that Ali Crum initially developed.

1:05:05She's a Stanford professor. And I, along with my collaborator, Jeremy Jameson, who's at Rochester, and Chris Bryan, who's at UT, we developed a mindset intervention that combines growth mindset. So your difficulties now can grow and change with stress can be enhancing. And when you embrace those difficulties and feel stressed, that stress is helping you. And so we have some very specific language that any leader can use to echo those messages of growth mindset and stress can be enhancing. The last two things I'll just say briefly are about belonging and purpose. These are big concepts that can feel ephemeral and hard to pin down.

1:05:43What I talk about in the book is that expert mentor mindset leaders have developed routines for, in the case of belonging, helping you tell a story to yourself about how early difficulties don't mean you don't belong, but instead are a means through which you create belonging. So they help you reframe social difficulties as a route to belonging. And with purpose, the big trick is to get young people to think beyond their narrow short-term self-interest or even their long-term self-interest and think about how any striving now, even any stress and frustration now is you doing your part to help build skills that help you make a difference in the world beyond yourself.

1:06:31It's the purpose chapter gives a set of routines and stories and studies about how impactful it can be to help a young person move from a world in which anything hard now is simply a sacrifice for good things in the long-term future. to instead think that difficulties now are a sign that I'm doing something meaningful and purposeful, that they're part of my passion for the future, and that they have implications beyond myself. So each one also has stories from real leaders who've tried to implement this, people who've struggled to implement this, why was it hard for them, and also how the mentor mindset fits in with each of these ideas and helps us to continue to use these practices in our daily routines over time.

1:07:21Thank you for sharing that, David. My last question for you would be, how do you hope your book will help build a better future, especially for adolescents and the next frontier of adolescent psychology and motivation research? I think that the book really comes from an acknowledgement that it's a time of crisis for a lot of people. They feel like, most people believe the young and the next generation will shape our future, but that terrifies most people. It makes us feel uncertain and afraid that what the media would tell us is a screwed up generation is soon going to be in charge. You even see people calling for an increase in the voting age.

1:08:04These young people today get offended over everything. We can't let them vote like we used to. And I think what I really want is for us to move out of a world where we are fearing the craziness that puberty and hormones cause in the brain and instead start harnessing whatever energy young people bring with them for the betterment of society and for the betterment of young people's lives. And I think that the pro-social argument is that, look, the number and influence of young people is continuing to grow, not just in our world, but also in the global south. Very soon, 60 % of all young people will live in the global south, right?

1:08:47So India, Sub-Saharan Africa, Pakistan, etc. Are we creating a future in which they think it's worth it to sacrifice now for the sake of their well-being later? Do they think there's a future worth saving? And if we don't create that feeling and perception as adults, then we're going to have a lot of young people that are going to turn to more extreme means of asserting their voice and autonomy. And so I think it's actually pretty urgent from a global perspective that we learn how to use the mentor mindset to create a better world for them that they then perceive as more fair and just and worth investing in.

1:09:23But the last thing is just simply our self-interest as leaders. Certainly for me as a parent of four, I am constantly humbled by how hard it is to reach young people as a baseball coach, right? And the hardest thing I've ever done is coached nine to 12 year olds play baseball. And if I had my kids, my students, my players listened to twice as much of what I've said to them, my life would be so much more efficient. It'd be more gratifying. So I want to give that sense of efficacy to any adult out there who cares about the next generation. And then the related point is the feeling of satisfaction of knowing that something you've done has improved the world in the future.

1:10:09and this is what I'll end on. There's almost nothing more fun than having a young person who you've mentored in a big or small way go on to be super successful. Not because we want to steal credit for what they've done, but it's almost like when an engineer builds an amazing building or bridge, every time you drive past it, you're just like, I built something that stood the test of time, that people are using, that they're loving, and that feels amazing. And I just think a lot of us would feel more fulfilled and happier if we more often had that experience of, maybe I only talked to this new hire for 45 minutes, but I think I said something to them that's going to stick with them.

1:10:52Or I might have only had this kid in my class for one year, but they're going to be different because of that. And that's just a lot of fun. It's thrilling. And it's one of the best parts about being human is we live in this social context where we get to influence people's lives. And I want more people to have that experience because they read the book. Well, David, thank you so much for that. And where is the best place for people to learn more about you if they would like to? Well, so I direct the Texas Behavioral Science and Policy Institute, and we are an R &D institute. We do lots of work on improving pathways for young people into the workforce, into higher ed.

1:11:30So a lot of our resources are available for free on that website. And then for people who want me to come speak, I'm booked by a group called LAVIN, L-A-V-I-N. So you can just Google me and LAVIN agency and they handle my bookings and which talks that I like to give. And also just check out the book. I poured everything I know into it. I really would love people check it out through Simon & Schuster or Amazon or wherever else you get your books. Well, David, thank you so much for joining us today. It was such an honor to have you. And I know the audience is going to really resonate with this episode.

1:12:06Great. Thanks a lot. And I'd love to stay in touch with any listeners and see how else I can be a resource for their work. I thoroughly enjoyed that interview with Dr. David Yeager. And I wanted to thank my friend, Katie Milkman, Simon & Schuster, and David for the honor and privilege of joining us on today's show. Links to all things David will be in the show notes at passionstruck.com. Please use our website links if you purchase any of the books from the guests that we feature here on the show. You can also catch all our episodes on YouTube at both our main channel, John R. Miles, where we post long form interviews and our clips channel, Passion Struck Clips, where we post two to eight minute clips from these long form interviews.

1:12:42Go there, subscribe, and join over a quarter million other subscribers. Advertiser deals and discount codes are in one convenient place. at passionstruck.com slash deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show. If you're looking for a daily dose of inspiration, then join me on all the socials at John R. Miles. And if you want to expand your courage muscles, then sign up for our weekly newsletter, Live Intentionally, where each week we curate a custom challenge based on the previous week's episodes. If you're interested in finding out where you stand on the continuum to becoming Passion Struck, then sign up for our Passion Struck quiz on passionstruck.com.

1:13:17It's based on the principles from my book, Passion Struck. It takes about 10 minutes to complete, and it will show you where your starting point is on your path to becoming Passion Struck. Take the quiz today. Before we wrap up, I am so excited to share a sneak peek of our next episode of the Passion Struck podcast. I'll be joined by Lauren Handel-Zander, founder and CEO of The Handel Group and creator of The Handel Method and Inner You, known for transforming the lives of clients like Hugh Jackman, Questlove, as well as top executives, Lauren is a master life coach who helps people cut through their excuses and take radical accountability over their lives.

1:13:54In this episode, we dive deep into how to shift your internal dialogue, make better choices, and align your actions with your deepest desires. If you're ready to take control and dream bigger, don't miss this fascinating conversation with Lauren Zander on the PassionStruck podcast. When you design your day, you're not just doing a to-do list or what's going to happen. It's an outcome for what you're up to and your intention written out for the day. The concept really is that if you tell yourself from your higher selves what you want to have happen each day, it's like directing your subconscious.

1:14:32And it's a profound way to keep a record of your own life and then design your day so that you're not just doing whatever you're doing. It's way more being connected to what you're doing. The fee for this show is that you share it with family or friends when you find something useful or interesting. If you know someone who would be interested in the motivation behind 10 to 25 year olds, then definitely share this episode with David Yeager with them. The biggest compliment that you can give us is to share the show with those that you love and care about. In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so that you can live what you listen.

1:15:04Until next time, go out there and become passionate. Remember to keep up for better ideas.