Creative anxiety, self-doubt, and procrastination with Fredrik Backman

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0:35Learn more at Toyota.com, the new all-electric family. Toyota, let's go places.

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1:25The Kindle Scribe makes it easy to keep your notes organized with everything you need in one place without having to sort through paper files or type notes on your laptop. I love how the Kindle Scribe brings my notes to life while making them impossible to lose. I know what I'm working on moving forward. What are you working on? Kindle Scribe. A friend of mine said to me, don't take it as an insult, but the thing that you have done better than anyone that I know is you have made the most of your potential. Like, yeah, He could be saying that I had very little potential to begin with. But he said, no, but you have.

1:59And I get what he meant. I agree. I got a little bit further than I should have based on my potential. And I don't have the necessary talents to deal with it, like dealing with success. And I just haven't found my footing in that.

2:20Hey, everyone. It's Adam Grant. Welcome back to Rethinking, my podcast with Ted on the science of what makes us tick. I'm an organizational psychologist, and I'm taking you inside the minds of fascinating people to explore new thoughts and new ways of thinking.

2:37Good evening. My name is Fredrik Bachmann. I first learned of Fredrik Bachmann from a speech he gave in an event for his publisher. I'm here tonight because my agent said that this would be good for my career. She said I need to learn how to speak in front of people. It will be fun, she said. So I told her that I write books. I spend eight hours every day locked inside a room with people I have made up. If I was comfortable talking to real people, I would have a real job. I was struck by both the heaviness and the humor of what he said in that speech. Being a writer is the best way I know how to get paid for being insane.

3:21My brain and I, we are not friends. My brain and I, we are classmates doing a group assignment called life. And it's not going great. So my agent, he said, maybe you can talk about how you suffer from creative anxiety, Frederick. But I don't have creative anxiety. I never get writer's block. And the secret is easy. It's procrastination. I don't want to brag, but I'm very good at procrastination. I'm going to have a writer's block. I just haven't gotten around to it yet. Frederick's first book, A Man Called Ove, was published in Sweden in 2012, and then the U.S. a year later, where it hit the New York Times bestseller list and was made into a film starring Tom Hanks.

4:05Frederick has written 11 books, including eight novels. His latest novel is called My Friends, but he's still very much sorting through what to do with his success. Most people have a cruising altitude where you're comfortable, and I'm just a little bit higher than my preferred cruising altitude would be. This conversation was unlike any other we've published on this show in a way that I really loved. For starters, from the moment we began talking, Frederick was as unguarded as anyone I've ever spoken with.

4:37I don't do a lot of interviews and I never know what people expect of me and I never know why the hell people invite me to stuff, but I'll do what I can. I've got a few reasons. Lots of things I'm excited to talk about. Is there anything you're hoping to either avoid or dive into? No. I mean, I avoid everything and dive into nothing. That's my policy in life. I suspected some of Frederick's humility was the result of the Law of Yante, which is a Scandinavian social code that says no one is better than anyone else. But as we talked, I realized it was much deeper than that. And this quality led to a fascinating conversation.

5:17Would you say you're a beneficiary or a victim of the Law of Yante? I mean, we use it like we make fun of ourselves a lot in Scandinavia. and we use that as kind of like explaining the Scandinavian mentality or the Swedish mentality. You know, don't be too full of yourself or don't think too highly about yourself or don't walk around thinking that you're something. I think it's good to be reminded to not let things go to your head. Yeah, I would say that ethos of humility is one of my favorite things about spending time in Scandinavia. At the same time, I've often heard from people that it can sort of stand in the way of confidence a little bit, self-confidence in particular.

5:59And I understand that that's been a bit of a challenge for you as a writer, which is ironic given how widely acclaimed your work has been. I know my friends has sold over a million copies and you've built quite an audience. So how in the world do you experience a crisis of confidence in the very moment when you're achieving your biggest success? I mean, I've always had a crisis of confidence. I don't remember a time in my life when I didn't have a crisis of confidence. And I don't think that's anyone's fault. Like, I can't blame the law of Jante for that. I deal very poorly with expectations. I do good with people who have no expectations of me.

6:40I can exceed no expectations, but everything else is a struggle for me. And it's always been like that. And I think at this point, it's probably never going to change. I don't think I'll ever be in a situation where I feel, well, I know how to do this now. It's always like I start a new book. It's always just free fall. My wife will tell you that during the writing of each book, there's a point where I am convinced that my career is over and this is the end of it, where I'm convinced by it. She's like, it's not an act. It's an actual thing. It happens at least once every book where for a couple of weeks, there's just darkness.

7:22And I don't know why. And I don't know how to fix it. I would love to. I would love to fix it. But it's just there every time. That's just how it works. And yet you keep doing it. Why? I don't know. I don't know. I honestly, you know, it was a psychological thing. I get too obsessed with everything within the story that I'm trying to create. Because it's also this whole thing, if I'm not a writer, I don't know who I am. I don't have any hobbies. Like, I don't know what I would be instead of this. So I kind of had to tell myself I could not be this and still be fine. But I mean, after I wrote My Friends, I retired.

8:07and my wife still says that you know that was the most relaxed and happy i've seen you in years and i felt 100 ready to leave it and i'm still 100 ready to leave it now i've written something so now i've sent a new book to my publisher and we'll see how that goes but um people ask me all the time when did you know that you wanted to be a writer and i said i still don't know if i want to be a writer. I'm still not there. I don't know. Wow. So why did you start? If I remember correctly, you were driving a forklift when you started writing? I mean, I dropped out of university and then my best friend gave me a job as a forklift driver.

8:46He's given like wherever he has worked, he has always given me a job. So he worked at a restaurant. So I worked at a restaurant. So he worked at a warehouse. So I worked at a warehouse. Like every, he has to give me jobs. and I drove a forklift for a while because I just had this idea that you know I'll try to write something like for magazines and then I became a freelancer and then after a few years I had this idea to maybe try to write a novel and then that became my first novel but it's just I really enjoy writing I really enjoy like storytelling is the one thing that I really really enjoy it's the only thing other than you know my wife and my kids that i've ever truly loved and been obsessed with i just love stories and i always loved stories that was the vehicle to escape when i was a kid you know i didn't have a lot of friends i was very socially awkward so stories was my way of escaping everything it was books and it was sports that i could use as a vehicle to escape reality That sounds very familiar.

9:53And I'm still like that. I don't care for reality very much. I like stories. So that's why I still do it. It's just that, like, I was on a book tour and someone asked me, like, isn't this great? Being on stage, I was like, yeah, yeah, I just wish that it was a smaller room. Well, it does make sense. Although I think if that's true, you're dramatically underestimating your skills as a speaker because I first became aware of you not through reading your work, but rather through watching a speech you gave. I think it was at Simon & Schuster. Yeah. I laughed so hard watching that speech. You know, it helps that my wife doesn't always tell me where I'm going and what I'm doing.

10:38So she had dramatically undersold what I was going to do. so i thought i was giving like your american publisher where you've been your entire career whom you owe a great debt of gratitude wants you to come and give a speech they're celebrating 100 years and i thought it was a speech at a dinner and it was a speech at a theater and jerry seinfeld was there like proper people like judy bloom was there and it was just this insane collection of authors and people that I look up to immensely. And the seconds before I walk out on stage, I was standing just outside of the stage, just feeling, well, this is what a heart attack feels like.

11:22This has to be it. Like I can't feel my arms. So that was just fueled by pure panic. Was the whole thing written or improvised or a mix of the two? No, no, it was written. I also had to insist because they wanted to put it on the teleprompter. And I was like, no, I have it written down. I need the paper. And they were like, but we'll put it on the teleprompter for you. And I'm like, I have to explain to you, this is like holding on to a life raft on the open sea. This is what I hold on to so I don't die. If you take this piece of paper from me, then this is not going to work.

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14:03This episode is sponsored by Toyota. There's something powerful about momentum, that feeling when things are moving forward, when you're not stuck, you're not waiting, you're just going. That's true in life and it's true in how we move through the world. Toyota's new all-electric vehicles are built to support that kind of momentum, Whether it's the quick acceleration of the CHR, the versatility of the BZ, or the capability of the BZ woodland. And with access to a growing network of chargers, including Tesla superchargers, it's designed to keep you moving, not slowing you down. Because capability isn't just about power.

14:36It's about removing friction. Learn more at Toyota.com, the new all-electric family. Toyota, let's go places. this.

14:48Well, I was fascinated by the way that you framed creative anxiety and procrastination. And I know you only had four minutes in that speech, but I wanted to go deeper on those themes. Talk to me about how you experience creative anxiety and what causes you to procrastinate. I mean, in a constant state of creative anxiety, because I know that some critics who don't like my work very much wouldn't believe it but i work very very hard like it takes a lot for me to do the things that i do like when i write something i've given it my very best even though you know some critics thinks that it still sucks i'm like yeah it might suck but i gave it all i had like it took everything out of me to write this so i'm always in a state of i'm struggling i'm struggling i'm struggling i'm struggling like the the process is chaos chaos chaos chaos book and then when i hold the book like i have no idea how this happened i don't know how i climbed out of that hole i have no idea how i you know got it all together somehow but i'm trying to accept that it will never go away if that makes sense i think i always had this idea that i will get to a point where i feel that i know what i'm doing like i will eventually just wake up one day and have it all figured out and i will be more sure of myself and i won't question myself as badly and i'll just be good i'll just arrive and i've tried to accept that that will never happen and that this is the state that i'm in and it's going to be that way like you can be on the bestseller list and you can get awards and it doesn't matter like that's not how confidence works it's not how anxiety works so i'm still there but i've tried to make a friend out of it i try to accept that it's the anxiety that makes you go back and edit three extra times yeah it's the anxiety that makes you try harder it's the anxiety that makes you question everything it's the anxiety that makes you evolve all the time that you never settle you try to be better all the time and i think with the procrastination i think i've just tried to learn how to be productive even when i'm procrastinating if that makes sense like i don't feel i'm gonna get any writing done today but maybe i can edit or maybe i can do research maybe i can just google a lot of things today or maybe i can just sit by the computer and read and maybe if i read something really good then maybe i'll get an idea and i start writing and i also try to teach myself that doing the writing is a lot like you tend to not take the thinking part into consideration like everyone asks you if you have a writing routine and i don't have a writing routine but i have a thinking routine there's a morning routine i drop my kids off at school and then and I drive to my office and I think, and I walk the forest with my dog and I think, like, okay, now I'm just going to think about the writing.

18:03I'm not going to think about anything else. And that's my routine. And then some days I write and some days I don't, but I always think. So I'm always like writing the story in my head, if that makes sense. Oh, there's so much to react to here. Well, first of all, I think it was Aaron Sorkin who said, you call it procrastinating, I call it thinking. And I have found in some of my research that there is truth to that. Jihei Shin and I have published some studies showing that people who procrastinate moderately tend to be more creative than people who procrastinate a lot, but also than people who procrastinate a little because some degree of delay, even though it might be uncomfortable or stressful or anxiety-inducing or maybe even guilt-inducing, some degree of delay forces you to incubate.

18:51It prevents you from rushing ahead with your first idea and allows you to wait for your best idea. It makes it possible to maybe reframe the problem and access more remote kind of unexpected directions for a storyline or more novel possibilities for an idea. And I'm so curious to hear about, is that your experience? Do you find that some of the procrastinating actually leads you to new ideas and more exciting directions? i think it sounds really good so i'm gonna take it but yeah i think there's a lot of truth to that like for me everything that i write down i have to think first i have to think and think and think and think and think and think and think before i have something that i can put down on paper and i think the procrastinating sometimes is even if you're walking circles around your computer you're still at the computer.

19:46Like you haven't given up. As long as you're procrastinating, you haven't given up yet. Ooh. Oh, that's a frame I have not heard before. You know, Frederick, I like that because I think when I first started sharing the research we did, we studied people trying to do creative work in their jobs. We did experiments where we attempted them to procrastinate to different degrees. And we kept finding there's this sweet spot where you do want to procrastinate a little. I then started saying, well, you know, we should all procrastinate maybe a little, maybe a little more. And I got so much pushback from people on that saying procrastination is already the bane of my existence.

20:23I do not need to procrastinate more. And all of a sudden it hit me, I'm positioning this wrong. This is not about motivating people to procrastinate. It's about normalizing the procrastination they already do and saying, this is actually sometimes a necessary part of the creative process. even though the postponing and the delay might be unintentional. You wish you could avoid it. Sometimes you actually derive unexpected benefits from it. I never thought of the possibility that you could frame that just as, you know what, this means I am still at it. I haven't quit yet. And that counts for something.

20:57I think it's how I view my entire life. It's just, I'm just barely hanging on. I feel that way as a parent, and I feel that way as a writer, and I feel that way as a friend, but I think I view the procrastinating and the walking circles around your computer the same way as I do when I talk to my kids. A lot of the argument between me and my children ends up with them or me saying, hey, I'm doing the best I can. I'm still here. I'm just hanging on, And it's, I'm trying to, that's the way that I battle anxiety now. That's been the most useful technique for me. It's to value effort and not outcome.

21:45Like what I do then is the same thing that I do when I struggle with writing now, when I feel like everything I'm doing is really bad and I don't know how to make this story. I don't know how to put what's in my head on paper. It feels like I'm failing. And I try to tell myself like, hey, did you do your best today? Did you give this your best? Yeah, I did. Like I just didn't have more in me today than this, but I did the best I could. And I think that's how I frame it now or try to. Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense. I found myself thinking of a couple of things as you articulate this. The first is my diving coach sent me a meme one day that I loved.

22:26It just said, you are not a machine. Your best looks different every day. And I realized that for most of my life, I have been grading my work every day based on my best ever. And I should know better as a psychologist, right? I should know that when you hit a personal best running, for example, or lifting, you're not just going to exceed that every single day. and yet I've carried around this implicit expectation that I will. I made the mistake of valuing the outcome every day and I want to make sure I value the effort daily, but I don't want to lose the outcome. I just need to stretch it into a larger time horizon.

23:06So I want to value my effort daily and I want to value the outcome on a monthly or yearly basis and say, okay, if I put in my best every day, whatever that best is, if I zoom out enough, it's going to add up to something of value. And I think I try to not value the outcome at all. Wow. No, I really, really, I try to make it smaller. I try to make my world smaller. I'm just going to do the thing that's in front of me now. And I know it sounds incredibly ungrateful, but I have a really hard time with trying to take in what people actually think about the writing I've done. So I kind of steer away from it, especially when I'm writing something else.

23:48Because the only thing that happens when people tell me that something was great is that I immediately go to, oh, you're not going to like the next thing I'm doing because I'm not going to be able to do that again. Like I'm not going to be able to replicate it. And that's kind of how I worked. I mean, from everything you've said so far, psychologists would probably describe you as a... As a moron and a maniac? No, neither. I think your self-portrait would fit with what Julie norm called defensive pessimism as opposed to strategic optimism where you you basically anticipate the worst scenario constantly and then you try to harness your anxiety as motivation yeah i went to a little bit of therapy obviously i've needed some therapy in my life my therapist has a very nice little house by the lake and a boat and he's done good business on me been lucrative and he said at one point he said i think the problem for you is that the thing that made people respond to your books is you diving into the parts of you that if you had any other line of work we would tell you like you need to think about those things less and he said you managed to manufacture a career where whenever someone says like you should do less of this or you should really work on these parts of yourself but you find a way to defend yourself with yeah but all of those i need all of those things like i can't fix my anxiety that's how i make a living does that make sense it does i understand now that i use it as a defense mechanism that i have to like work on these things but it takes time it's a lot of work well it does i mean it does make sense i mean you just answered actually two of the questions i wanted to ask you about, there were a couple of lines in my friends that really stuck with me and they seem to be very self-descriptive now as I, you know, as I hear you talk about yourself.

25:49So I'll just read them to you. One was he wrote, he was good at seeing beauty in everything. That happens if you're no good at seeing it in yourself. Oh yeah, that might be something you have lived. And then the other one is, it's a lie that people are scared of being alone because what we fear is being abandoned you can choose to be alone but no one chooses to be left yeah were those both autobiographical statements yeah there's a lot of there's a lot of really autobiographical stuff and i think it's in all my books but i think it's maybe more of me in my friends than in any other book and it's those two quotes are i mean i i i don't like myself very much uh and it's the thing that i work on the most and it took me you know well into my adult years way longer than it should have been that i understood that i have to work on liking myself a little more because i'm gonna see if i can explain this you have to understand that english is not my first language and i don't even speak my first language very well it's well you could have fooled me it's uh when you have kids and you have a marriage i came to the realization that it's if i don't work on liking myself then that is selfish because if i don't find a place within me where i don't struggle so much with this self-hate, then I'm going to be a really crappy husband and a really crappy father.

27:33Wow. Like, in order to be there for them, I have to do the work on me so that when I'm with them, I'm not consumed by all of my feelings about myself. Wow. You know, I find it so difficult sometimes to convince people who are hard on themselves to build self-compassion and show themselves a little more kindness and understanding and not constantly just berate themselves. And I think I've always tried to highlight the benefits to them. And sometimes I'll even go into the research and say, look, there's this whole body of evidence spearheaded by Kristen Neff that shows that you are happier, you're less depressed, you're less anxious.

28:20I never thought to frame self-compassion as something that actually benefits the people around you. That if you are a little bit kinder to yourself, you will be a better parent, better partner, better creator, better colleague. I'm going to try this. It's the only thing that I eventually arrived at. It was this notion that I think a lot of people who struggle with depression, I would assume feel disconnected from themselves like you look in the mirror and it doesn't feel like you like I don't know who this person is I'm dragging this body around but it doesn't feel like it belongs to me and the person other people view me as that doesn't feel as me so what I try to do now is I try to not view it as like, oh, I'm gonna find a way so that I feel like myself.

29:22I try to find a way to say, okay, so there's this person that I'm dragging around. I'm gonna try to make peace with him. I'm gonna try to make our coexistence as good and healthy as I can, because when I'm constantly struggling with myself, then I'm no good to other people because then I get self-absorbed. You get to this point where you can't take in what other people are saying or other people need. Like if you're in a deep depression, it's very hard for you to feel empathy or sympathy or be a good listener or whatever. So I'm working on that. I'm working on framing it as if I do the work, It's not necessarily to make myself happy.

30:09I think I always had that goal before. I had this idea that one day I'm just going to wake up and I'm just going to be happy. And one of the most useful things that a therapist told me was, well, do you need to be happy? And it was the most insane thing that anyone had ever said to me. I was like, what are you talking about? Do you know how much you cost an hour? i'm like what do you why do you think i'm here and he said but do you need to be happy and more than that do you think that that's a reasonable expectation for you and then he said i think you should aim to be okay and then if at the end of the day you ask yourself like instead of asking yourself am i happy am i happy now am i happy enough like instead of doing that just ask yourself are you okay was this an okay day did you get through the day okay when i'm really in the dark when i you know descend into the real darkness and self-doubt i just tell myself did you do your best today yeah i did my best today i still messed everything up but i really did do my best it was my best mess this was my best mess this was the best best mess that i could do It could have been even messier.

31:26Yeah. Did I miss my deadline? Yes, I did. And do I have anything to send for them? No, I don't. Am I even writing the book that I told them that I was going to write? No. It's like I pitched something and they were all excited. And then I started writing something else. But did you do your best? Yeah, I did my best. And this is what it is. Frederick, I have to tell you that the disconnect between your self-talk and the depth of your insight and wisdom is as big as I've ever seen. For a guy who thinks he's just a moron stumbling around in the dark, you invented a hell of a flashlight. And I think other people can see that.

32:06It's obviously a struggle for you to see that. But you have, I mean, you've anticipated a bunch of research findings that have been hugely influential in psychology. and took a lot of data collection to discover. So one thing you reminded me of as you were talking is there's a paper by a pair of Finnish researchers. It was Salmela, Aero, and Nermi who showed that for a long time, we just assumed that when people got depressed, that made them self-focused. So you start to feel down, you turn your attention inward, what's wrong with me? You start to ruminate and then you withdraw and you become sort of a less pleasant person to be around as you were describing.

32:43And they showed, though, that it also goes a little bit the other way, that if you spend too much time focusing inward, trying to fix what's wrong with you, that that actually can start to precipitate depression because you end up sort of making yourself miserable and you feel like you're not worthy of being around other people. And that can sink you deeper. And it sounds like you've experienced the causal arrow going in both of those directions. Yeah, absolutely. I can relate a lot to that. The other one, which is just very closely connected to that, when you were talking about, do I need to be happy?

33:19I was thinking about the research of Iris Maus and colleagues who show that when people set happiness goals, they often become less happy, especially if they're from individualistic cultures because they get into this, well, I need to work on my happiness and I need to do what is going to bring me joy. and they forget that a great deal of being okay, as you put it, is having meaningful relationships with other people. And happiness is rarely, it rarely succeeds as a purely solitary pursuit. And it sounds like you've come around to that view as well, even though it's not your impulse. Yeah, I mean, it's been a long way around before I kind of started to figure out that, you know, maybe I'm pursuing the wrong things.

34:07and in the wrong way and you know maybe my my expectations are wrong and also this idea that i think it was the most important thing that i'm trying to get through is the part where i have to make peace with myself i think i'm an incredibly narcissistic person at the core of me and i kind of had to identify that to fight it to really really stop being so focused on myself and my feelings all the time which was also if you have narcissistic tendencies and you're kind of full of yourself but you also struggle with anxiety it's either hubris or the abyss there's only those two and if you have that kind of a personality and you go into a line of work where it's encouraged that you sit alone in a room and really just dive into yourself, then I think that's a cocktail for a very, very selfish and not very nice person.

35:15I like try to be aware of all that so I can fight it. I respect that. I also have to say, if you're a narcissist, you are the most humble narcissist I've ever met. Yeah, but I think you'll meet a lot of humble narcissists. And those are just those of us who kind of identified that I think that's a bad part of me. And I think I have to fight it. Well, I've only known you for an hour, but you do a lot of torturing of yourself just for being human yeah but that's also kind of the job is to try to be better i wrote a book called anxious people and i wrote it when i came out of being in a lot of therapy because i burned out and when i came out of therapy i didn't think i was going to be able to write anymore because i had had such a deep burnout so i started writing this thing this comedy about being in therapy because i thought this is going to be my writing exercise to see if i can write again and that kind of grew and grew and grew and grew and you know turned into a novel but there's a line in there and i see if i can quote it in english but i think the english quote is that we're taught that we're the sum of our experiences but that's an unbearable thought because we have to let ourselves believe that we're more than all of the things that we have done that we are also all of the things that we will do my identity is also all of my tomorrows that's also me not just my experiences and the mistakes also the things that i might be capable of tomorrow.

37:04That's how we get through the day. That's how we get up in the morning, that we're not done. I'm still here. I'm still hanging around. I might not be producing much, but I'm still here. I'm still around. I'm still in the fight. And that's how I view it. That's how I view myself as a father. My proudest achievement is that my wife is still married to me. We've been together for 19 years, married for 17, and my kids still like me. Like my kids still want to go to the movies with me. And my kids still want to tell me about this video game that they're playing. And they're not terribly ashamed of me when I drop them off at school.

37:45These are my proudest achievements. And I tell my kids all the time that I know I messed a lot of things up. I know I wasn't the best father at all times. I know I was a lot in my head at times. You know, I missed things and I forgot things and I didn't listen enough and I didn't understand everything and I made mistakes. Like I know I messed up, but I'm trying and I hope that you see that I'm trying. And it's this thing that we're pretty good at telling each other now. We kind of learned that as a technique, me and my kids, when we're in an argument or when we don't see eye to eye it's like we have this thing where i can turn around and we can be mad at each other and we can you know we can be frustrated but i can turn around and say hey i i see that you're trying and they turn around and they go like i see that you're trying too you know and there can be a lot of frustration but it's like i see you trying i see you trying too good good so just to remind each other that you know we're still coming from a place of love here.

38:52I'm going to try that. I can see that you're trying. I love that.

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41:44Okay, Frederick, it's time for a lightning round. Are you ready? Sure. The first one is, what is the worst writing advice you've ever gotten? Any advice that just tells you, don't do this or never do this. You can do anything if you make it work. Okay, that's great. What is an unpopular opinion you hold that you're excited to defend? That I think, in general, video games are good for kids. Oh, I'm with you there. We did a whole podcast on it. I felt that you would agree with me, but it's a very strong opinion that I have that in general, not all video games, not for all children, not at all times, but in general, I think video games are doing so much good.

42:27Such good qualifications on that too. Again, you anticipated the evidence so well. On average, they're great for teaching grit and resilience. They're actually surprisingly social as opposed to isolating. And it's how I learned to find flow as a kid also. Okay. What is something you've changed your mind about recently? I don't know how to answer it in one sentence, but it's someone I cared about a lot passed away, childhood friend of mine. And I learned that it was good for me to schedule grief, which is a weird thing to say. Not weird at all. I never thought about this with grief, but there's a whole body of research in psychology on the benefits of scheduling anxiety, right?

43:13Setting aside worry time to contain it and have it not take over at all times. And it sounds like you found something similar helpful with grief. I did. And it was a childhood friend and he passed away and we hadn't spoken for a while. And someone close to him reached out and said, you know, he had a gift for you. He bought something for you that he never got around to giving you. And it was Lego because he loved Lego. So he was the Lego typewriter because I love typewriters. I collect old typewriters. So I spent the last week building this Lego typewriter. For an hour every night, I would sit there building Legos and sometimes I'm sitting there holding the pieces, looking at the picture for 20 minutes because my mind drifted.

44:00But it was like I scheduled grief so that I didn't break apart during the day so that I didn't get overwhelmed with whatever emotions I was struggling with. And I was like telling myself that it's okay to feel it now. You know, go ahead, feel it now. And then we'll feel it for an hour and we'll build a little bit of Lego and I'll remember him. And then it was obvious when I was building it, like you're building it with him now. Wow. Frederick, I'm so sorry for your loss, first of all. And secondly, what a powerful way to grieve and also a beautiful way to honor your friend's memory. I have one final thing, which is a little office hours moment.

44:47You have a question for me? I do. What is happiness? What is happiness? Oh, how do I do that? Lightning round style. Well, we talked about it a little bit earlier. I think you hit on what for me is the most powerful path to happiness, which is finding a way to make other people happier. And I also think, though, maybe I have another response to this that's informed by reflecting on what you've shared so far, which is I think that I think a big part of happiness is finding a healthy balance between self-acceptance and self-improvement. Oh, yeah, that's good. And you're very good at the second and terrible at the first.

45:29From what I can tell. I think that it's, for me, a big part of happiness because I've also been someone who just relentlessly strives to get better. And I guess one of the things I've learned is that happiness lies in trying to better my present self without hating my past self. That's very good. Trying to see how can I make this better without falling down the dark hole of how bad it was. Exactly. Exactly. And it almost doesn't matter if it was bad or mediocre or good. I'm going to want to make it better regardless. And so I'm just going to spend less time wallowing in the evaluation of how it was and just try to move forward with, okay, what's the most important next step I can take to try to evolve?

46:22Can I ask you something? Yeah, please. Do you think there will ever be a point where you feel that your success, this incredible success, does the responsibility get overwhelming for you? I feel like I got really lucky that a door opened and then there were a bunch of additional doors on the other side of it. And I feel a responsibility to not waste the fact that I got to walk through those. and I feel especially a responsibility to open the door for other people. Yeah, that's good. You have a responsibility to open the door for someone else. Yeah, that's very useful. Do you think that, can I ask one last thing?

47:04Yeah, fire away. Do you think that you will ever be in a situation where you feel that your success is standing in the way of your happiness? Oh, I've definitely been there. I think I was there when I started getting asked to give speeches more often. And as a shy introvert, I was afraid of public speaking. And I decided that in those moments, it was more important for me to face my fears than it was to feel happy. I'm glad I did that because now I actually love speaking most of the time. I think there are definitely, I mean, there's probably a good decade of my life where I traded, I'd say, you know, on a zero to 10 scale, it would have been much easier to be at a nine and happiness if I worked less and I deliberately chose to be at a seven or an eight because I had projects that I found meaningful and things I wanted to get better at and I said I'm okay not being happy in these moments or not being as happy as I could be in these moments because meaning matters more to me than happiness.

48:11And I was okay with that trade-off, but I wouldn't have wanted to pursue success and drop myself down to a two or three in happiness. And I don't think I would have found any happiness or any meaning if success were the main goal. I think it's always been, how do I create something that's worthwhile for other people? How do I gain the freedom to use my time in ways that are worthwhile for me. And if I can do those two things, I hope success and happiness are byproducts. Such interesting questions you ask. What was the thing you said? Meaning means more to me than happiness. It does. That's something to think about.

48:55There's a very good phrasing of that feeling. It's very, very good. Well, this has been fascinating. I think this is unlike any interview I've done before in that I can't find an ounce of impression management or self-presentation concern in the way that you communicate it all. It's almost as if you don't care about being seen positively. You just want to be seen accurately. That's such a rare quality. No, thank you for saying that. That means a lot to me, you're saying that. It's exactly like that. There's a whole literature in psychology on the tension that many people feel between self-enhancement, like I want to look good, and self-verification.

49:40I want you to see the real me. And I didn't think it was possible for anyone to just be in full self-verification mode and not at all in self - enhancement mode. And you made me rethink that. Oh, thank you. I'm super grateful that you had me on. Thank you. Thank you so much. Rethinking is hosted by me, Adam Grant. The show is produced by Ted with Cosmic Standard. Our producer is Jessica Glazer. Our editor is Alejandra Salazar. Our engineer is Asia Pilar Simpson. Our technical director is Jacob Winnick, and our fact checker is Paul Durbin. Our team includes Eliza Smith, Roxanne Hailash, Van Ben Chang, Julia Dickerson, Tansika Sung Manivang, and Whitney Pennington Rogers.

50:24Original music by Hans Dale Su and Alison Leighton Brad.

50:31When earlier you said, I have no hobbies. I think you collect typewriters. I think you enjoy building Legos. It sounds like you also occasionally play video games. You've proven yourself wrong. Yeah, the video games part, it's with my kids. I enjoy watching my kids play video games. We don't have to talk. I'm just, you're doing something and I'm here too. And now I'm a part of it.

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