How to challenge your self-limiting beliefs with Shawn Achor

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1:38Belief requires an essence of willpower. It changes whether or not we try to make friends or to date or to get jobs. Beliefs change not only the math about what's possible and probable, but it changes our path too. Hey 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.

2:10Sean Acor is a positive psychology evangelist best known for his case that happiness drives success, not the other way around. He gave one of the first viral TED Talks about it. When I was seven years old and my sister was just five years old, we were playing on top of a bunk bed. Somehow, without any help or push from her older brother at all, suddenly Amy disappeared off of the top of the bunk bed and landed with this crash on the floor. She had landed painfully on her hands and knees on all fours on the ground. I said, Amy, Amy, wait, don't cry, don't cry. Did Did you see how you landed? No human lands on all fours like that.

2:43Amy, I think this means you're a unicorn.

2:48The smile spread across her face and she scrambled right back up onto the bunk bed with all the grace of a baby unicorn. With one broken leg. What we had stumbled across is something called positive psychology, which is the reason that I'm here today and the reason that I wake up every morning. In his latest book, The Power of Beliefs, Sean gets into another aspect of positive psychology. He argues that if we can change what we believe, we can change meaningful things in our lives. It's been way too long. I'm so grateful to get to see you again. What I really want to know is, how's Amy? Amy the unicorn's doing great.

3:26She still requires some royalties for me using her unicorn story for the TED Talk, but she's doing wonderful. She has three kids, It's one who just went off to college. So she's thriving. When most people think of Sean Acor, that's the first thing they think of, that success may not bring happiness, but happiness can breed success. How do you square that view with the fact that so many successful people are unhappy? So I think that people can be extraordinarily successful or wealthy and perform well in sports and still be negative and grumpy and cynical and pessimistic. And you and I both met a lot of those people.

4:02But when you look at the role that optimism plays in improving performance across the board, everything from performance on tests to performance in sports to longevity to social relationships improve. So what my assumption would be is that, yes, there are those people, but they're actually underperforming their ability. At the same time, the other thing that I would say is that factors into that question about success. We know great biographies of people who are extraordinarily mean or negative or hard on themselves, who have been prolific performers and musicians and CEOs, but then they also have substance abuse or commit suicide at a young age or their relationships break down.

4:46And so when you look at success in its entirety, not just through a single lens of their performance on a court or how much money that they have on paper, what we start to see is that when we are optimistic, when we see meaning and purpose, when we have social connection, it leads to greater levels of success across the board. I also have to wonder about the upper bound on that. So Barry Schwartz and I wrote a paper years ago on the too much of a good thing effect and how across pretty much every domain of positive psychology we could find, you could overdo it. And the work that comes to mind right here is Shige Oishi's on quote unquote, being too happy, where he finds that I think you probably know this research better than I do, but my recollection of it is on a zero to 10 scale, people who score an eight on happiness on average are more successful even financially than people who score a six, but that the eights are actually better off than the tens.

5:43And yeah, I think about a 10 on happiness and I think about complacency. I think about, I love my life so much that I'm just enjoying the present and I'm not setting goals for the future. Do you think there's such a thing as being too happy? Do you think there's a sweet spot of happiness? So I think it's a brilliant critique. I agree in terms of happiness and beliefs. What I'm interested in is how do we realistically view the present, but maintain the belief that eventually my behavior will matter if linked to other people. What we're looking for is behavior that allows us to feel emotions that cause us to thrive.

6:22But if happiness is about pleasure, it leads to complacency if you get up to a 9 or a 10, because we don't want to keep moving forward. And that's part of what I was arguing for why I wanted to use a different definition of happiness. Because if you redefine happiness as the joy you feel moving towards your potential, joy is something you can experience even when life is not pleasurable. But the other side of it is that it propels us towards more of our potential, that it doesn't allow us to rest on our laurels. It's the fuel for what we're experiencing. The only middle path is the one I think you're describing, that I think that the eights in those studies would describe, which is I'm not happy all the time, but I find that I function better at a positive state than a negative state.

7:05And I can realistically look at some of the negatives we see in the world, but maintain that belief that in the midst of the good and the bad that we're experiencing, that eventually my behavior will matter. So one of the stories that I share is I got to give a talk to a group of these CEOs of these top tech companies. And afterwards, one of the CEOs offered to drive me to the airport to talk about how he could cascade this research through his company. So I was so excited. I really wanted to do this research. I got into this guy's really nice sports car. I don't know what it was. The doors went up instead of out and it was yellow.

7:35And I got in and I figured out how to close the door, put on my seatbelt. And he immediately started telling me how his company had been growing so quickly, his stress levels had been skyrocketing. And as he was speeding towards the airport and weaving all over the road and I was holding on for dear life, wondering why I got in the car with this guy, that little seatbelt bell was going off. And I turned to him, we were joking around already, and I can't remember exactly what led to it, but I was like, yeah, and you don't wear seatbelts. And he said, no, Sean, I listened to your talk. I love your research.

8:01I'm an optimist too, and kept driving and talking. And what I realized was this is not the type of optimism that we're looking for. That's irrational optimism, which gives happiness a bad name. The reason that I don't study people that are happy all the time is because that they're not experiencing the realities of the negative that they have within their life, which also means that they're cutting themselves off from the learning moments of the negative that we're experiencing within our world. Irrational optimists don't put on seatbelts because they don't think that they're going to be in a car accident.

8:31And optimism, I will argue, is great for a lot of things, but it doesn't stop cars from hitting us. It doesn't stop reality from impinging upon us. But on the other side of the spectrum is pessimism. And pessimists believe that at core, the problems that they see are permanent and pervasive, but also that their behavior doesn't matter. And at the far end of pessimism, you don't wear a seatbelt, because it doesn't matter. If you get a car accident, you're going to die anyway. Which one other example of that happened with the longevity studies. There was a study that came out that found that pessimists live longer.

9:01And I think that some of the pessimists around the world were very excited about the study. Temporarily very happy about that. Yes. But it didn't last. Exactly. Right. Well, because I think that they got it wrong because what they described as the pessimists were the people who were worried that they were going to die from heart disease. So they went and got cholesterol testing, right? they went and got preventative measures. And what I would argue is that that's not pessimism. If they believe their behavior matters, that's the rational optimist. What I'm interested in is the people that can recognize, yes, my cholesterol might be high.

9:34And because of this, I believe my behavior matter. And I believe that if I diet and exercise, it'll have a positive function. And those people stick with diet regimens. They stick with their drug routines. And those people are the ones that trend in a positive direction. So for you, the difference between rational and irrational optimism really boils down to, at some level, the difference between I know good things are going to happen no matter what, and I believe that I'm capable of making good things more likely to happen. Yes. So if you don't believe the change is possible, it stops a lot of those changes from even starting in the first place.

10:11Well, this is what the power of beliefs is all about. So let's talk a little bit about the great drift. I don't think anybody who listens to our show has not heard about the rise of anxiety, depression, loneliness, burnout. And I think you've highlighted that underlying all of these so-called crises is actually a crisis of belief. Talk to me about that. So as you might know, Adam, I started back at Harvard Divinity School. So I was studying Christian ethics and comparing it to Buddhist ethics because I was fascinated about how our beliefs about the world change the way we act in it. Why do we give?

10:47Why do we forgive? Why do we wake up in the morning? And you see very different answers based upon the mental narratives that people have about the world and those beliefs that they hold. One of the things that I found fascinating is that over the past several years, you see religious faith, for example, on a dramatic decline in a short period of time with no new brand new information that proved that God didn't exist. And in the same world, we're living in a space in which there's this rise of AI and people wondering about what it is to be human. And in the midst of that world, we start to think, all right, so what role does human belief play?

11:23for all of human history, all of our collective beliefs came from four places. They came from our job, our village, our social, like our religious structure and our political structure. But we've become untethered from all four of those over the past several years. So we don't have those sources of collective belief, but we're hungry for them. And we're hungry for them. So we latch onto belief in other ways. We grab onto influencers who might be just as angry or frustrated with the world or clinging to other ideas of like about what it is to be masculine or the lack of comfort that we need in the world.

12:02Or if we could just exercise enough or get down to a certain weight, then we could find that happiness and meaning and purpose that we had been pursuing all along. There was a study that I highlighted that 32 % of Americans claimed that they believed that we're living in the end times. And that was cross politics and cross religion. And if one out of three people believe we're on this immediate decline into entropy and to a zombie apocalypse, like why would you bring children into this world with those beliefs? Why would you keep doing your English poetry study? Why would you write a book or date or invest in other people?

12:37So those beliefs, I think because we've eroded some of those collective belief sources have left us hungry. And you can see it in one really cool way, which I just find fascinating that the placebo effect, which most of your audience knows, it doesn't work all the time. There's lots of qualms about it. But the placebo effect is rising in the U.S. So I think that it's not that beliefs went away. I think that the beliefs are still there, even in a world in which we feel like the power of belief is on the decline. Okay, so this is fascinating. If I'm following you correctly, you're saying that the placebo effect is getting stronger.

13:10And what that suggests to you is that people are operating more in a belief vacuum than they were in the past. That they're basically, in the absence of a placebo, they're lacking some foundation of confidence or faith or optimism. And sort of with that backdrop, all of a sudden, like telling somebody, hey, this is a treatment, gets a bigger boost psychologically or behaviorally or even physiologically than it would have otherwise. I think that that's true. And I think that there might be multiple explanations for it. I think that as science and technology improve, we just believe that it's going to work better.

13:47But I think that there is a desire to believe in something. And in the absence of knowing what to do, you could see it in the midst of COVID, where any treatment that was suggested by someone on Instagram, people are like, yeah, I've got to try it out. This is what's going to do it. And I don't understand what no one else believes. Right, exactly. Exactly, except for the valid ones. But you could see all these invalid responses, but we couldn't test them. So we didn't know if they're invalid at that point, but you could see this hunger for, okay, so what do we believe in? And it's not just in the medical space.

14:20You know, a fascinating one is that, you know, we have the home field advantage that we've known about for years, that when you play in your home field, you play better and it's a statistical advantage. That's when you aggregate. So that's regardless of opponent. And I got to talk briefly to Pete Carroll when he was back with the Seattle Seahawks. And I asked him, why is there this advantage? And he was like, well, you know, you don't have to travel. You're not tired. You know, right where the uprights are in the stadium. And you're at your preferred elevation that you practice in and preferred weather.

14:50And that was the consensus view. And then we had COVID. And we got to watch the athletes, but without fans in the stands. And the home field advantage in those games disappeared. Gone. Which is amazing. You don't have people cheering for you, building your confidence. Right. You don't have people also that you're worried about letting down. That's exactly it. Yes. And it turns out that the home field advantage was about all the things you just mentioned, Adam. It was about the beliefs that I'm not alone, that people are for me instead of against me. And that creates a performance advantage. And, you know, it's also, I think there's a direct piece and an indirect piece of that, right?

15:25So when we think about the home field advantage, there's the, of course, I get a little spring in my step from my fans rooting for me. But there's also the, like the refs feel more pressure to not make a call that goes against the home team when the whole crowd is there. Exactly. Right. So, and that disappears when you don't have that immediate response from the fans in the stands cheering for you. And I think the problem is that the more lonely that we feel with this world and leads into the work that you're doing in your book coming out later this year, is that that loneliness, that lack of social connection, What we've done is we've stripped out some of the collective beliefs that we share with one another.

16:02But I think the original research I was doing with the happiness advantage is that when we feel these positive beliefs, that I matter, that I'm not alone, that my behavior matters, that I have something to give, that I'm something to be grateful for, those, I believe, propel us towards an upward spiral of success. One of the things I thought was powerful about your book is you give us techniques to change our own beliefs. And I have to say, I don't know that you won an argument for me, but you at least added an argument. So let me just give you a quick backstory, and then you can walk us through some techniques for building on this.

16:37But it was probably 2018. I was having lunch with Danny Kahneman, and he was asking me what I was working on. And I told him I was really excited to write a book called Think Again, which was going to be about the power and importance of questioning and rethinking our beliefs. And Danny told me not to write the book. He said, nobody ever changes their beliefs. And at first I was crushed. No, no, no. Danny, this is what your work has done for all of us. You identified all these decision-making heuristics and biases that led us to realize how often we were wrong and then reevaluate our assumptions and convictions and then have a better shot at getting it right.

17:20And as I grilled him about why he thought this was a terrible book idea, I realized his sticking point was the word belief. That he saw beliefs as fundamentally ingrained, as so deep-seated that nobody would ever really change them. And when I reframed the conversation a little bit and said, actually, what I really want to do is I want to help people get faster and better and more comfortable at changing their opinions, at changing their minds. He said, oh, you should absolutely write this book. I changed my mind on a dime. I changed my mind so quickly that it drives all my collaborators and my family members crazy.

17:54This is probably my most important skill in life. And I came away from that conversation realizing that it might be a completely different animal to change your opinions than to change your beliefs. So make the case, first of all, that this is something we have control over and tell me why Danny was wrong. Well, the first thing that I would say to that is that when I ask somebody about what their beliefs are, they usually tell me whether or not they're a conservative or a liberal. And if I'm like, okay, give me some more beliefs. And then they'll tell you maybe if they're religious or not. And if I'm like, okay, give me some more beliefs, then they just peter out.

18:27And then they might just make a joke like, I believe my Jets are going to win the Super Bowl, which we both know is not going to happen, right? But we actually have beliefs about everything. We have beliefs about whether or not crypto is a valid currency. We have beliefs about whether or not it's safe to get into a Waymo. We have political beliefs. We have religious beliefs. We have beliefs about what pants we are supposed to wear or whether I should have worn a collar for this. Like all these different types of beliefs. And some of those beliefs don't move us very much. But some of those beliefs have an incredibly predictive value in terms of what happens next in your life.

19:03That those certain beliefs change the math about what's possible and probable in someone's life. Like the belief that people like me are bad at math or that people like me will never be successful. And I think the problem is that when we separate out beliefs and opinions, we've put belief, the word, into a category that only can possibly include religion and philosophy and politics, which is such a limited version of it. And what I would argue is that most of psychology argues against that. I mean, I think that mice were changing their beliefs about where they were going to find cheese in a maze and they get faster and faster being able to do that.

19:38And I think the same thing happens to us is that if I believe that my behavior matters, but I keep getting cut from every team that I try and get on basketball, eventually I'm going to start learning that I'm not as good at basketball as I thought I was or that I need to have just an incredible amount of grit and that might change in the future. But I think in each of those moments, as we're pursuing dating or as we're pursuing getting onto a basketball team or to be successful, each one of those requires testing of the theories that your brain has about the world. So in the book, I define beliefs as the lens to which you view the world, which is, I went the opposite direction.

20:14So I went, it's basically everything, right? Which became, for me, hard to write the book because it's so unwieldy now. It's now all of psychology, philosophy, and politics. So that was too much to take on. But I think that the middle ground there is that we need to open up our willingness to understand what belief is. So in the book, I highlight these seven beliefs that I think of them that are some of the most productive. I think there's ones that I missed, honestly, and that you just couldn't fit into a book. One of those is change is possible. That didn't get into the book. I felt like I wrote about that before happiness, which was a previous book I had.

20:46And so I didn't write about them, but that's a big one. But the beliefs I think are universal are the beliefs that my behavior matters, that I'm not alone. I matter, this work is meaningful. I have something to give, I have something to be grateful for, and that there's something greater than me. And I think that those beliefs are much wider than the net of justice, just politics or religion. I think that's right. And if change is impossible, well, then what are we doing, right? Why would we listen to a podcast, right? Why would I read a book? Why would I write a book if I didn't believe that change is possible?

21:17And that's all the arguments you were making in your book, right? So I think your list of seven plus some additional beliefs is a great place to start. I think, you know, I was immediately curious when you went through this list about what do I do if I discover that I'm struggling with one of those beliefs? How do I change it? So I don't believe my behavior matters. I'm struggling to find something to be grateful for. Like, I don't think I have anything to give. What do I do now? So when we look at not only psychology, but would you look at history and politics, when we're trying to get people to change their beliefs, there's a couple of things that they do.

21:54They try to change the sources that are around them. You change the common text that you have. You change the memories and how you're priming those memories in someone's life. So that's a great place to start. That's one of my favorite ones that I hadn't even thought about. If you talk to memory researchers, they say oftentimes a lot of our memories is you're remembering the previous memory of it, not the actual experience of it. Like I talked to one of my friends who said he started trying this out. This is while I was writing a book. I was playing with different ideas. And he said, I thought I was that no one liked me as a kid.

22:26I've always not been good with making friends. You know, I've always been kind of a loner. And his parents had given them this box of all these photos. And he looked back at them and he had all these pictures of him and scouts and going to camp and being part of these teams and all these kids at his birthday party. So what it started to do was to break down that original belief that I'm a loner, I've never had friends, and change it to a belief that actually I've had social connection. I might be able to do this in some parts of my life. I did this in my own life to make this more practical. I was stepping back out from taking time to be with my kids to write this book, and I had to work so hard on it, I felt like I missed the entire fall.

23:06And my belief was, I just screwed up. Like, I messed up this whole fall. I was all about work. This is not what I wanted to do. And I missed this valuable finite time with my kids and I can never get it back. And one of the things I did is I went on, I don't know what prompted this, but I went on Shutterfly and we've made some photo books. And I started pulling out some of the favorites that I had from the fall and just putting it into this book. And I'd forgotten about all these Harry Potter parties and like the dressing up for multiple Halloweens and the kids at school and the hiking trips and all of this.

23:35And what I realized was by the time that I finished that photo book, the story that I had been telling myself, and we can call a story or the belief that I had, the opinion that I had about myself was not only erroneous, but it wasn't serving me, right? If I felt like I was a bad dad because of the decisions I made, I might've pivoted and not finished the book, right? Or I would have felt bad when I'm with my kids or changed the way I interact with my wife. But because I took that step of going back to those previous positive memories, it changed not only that current belief, but what I'm arguing in the book is the beliefs change not only the math about what's possible and probable, but changes our path too.

24:09Those are such interesting examples because you are finding evidence to challenge a false belief and say, hey, actually, I feel like I missed the fall. I have data proving me wrong. I have photos with my kids. They activate memories of activities we did together and conversations we had. Maybe I wasn't as present as I'm used to being or as present as I wanted to be, But I wasn't at a zero. I was somewhere in the middle of that spectrum. That's right. I think that goes back to your original critique is we don't want to be like, hey, my whole life has been great. My parents were perfect. I've been perfect because then I won't pivot.

24:45And that course correction doesn't happen when we only see the positive. But to be honest, I don't think we're on that side of the spectrum. I mean, I think given the burnout, anxiety, loneliness, and depression we see in the world, we're not on the side of being irrationally optimistic or positive about our present. I feel like people are terrified of AI. And they're feeling alone and that people are believing that their behavior doesn't matter at work as much. And that they feel like that there's nothing greater than them. So there's not something to pursue or awe or wonder. And I think that those things are limiting us.

25:18So what I'm intentionally trying to do is to fill in the gaps to create beliefs that actually serve us. And I think that that goes back to the critique that has to be happening at the same time, which is, one, are these rational? And two, are these leading to greater levels of happiness and performance in my life so that my life is actually improving instead of I'm living divorced from reality? Yeah, I think you're right. We need exactly this view right now because it does seem like we see growing numbers of people amplifying problems. Yes. I think we see this in the dialogue about capitalism, for example.

25:51There are tons of people describing capitalism as the root of all evil. I'm like, I don't know about you, I sort of like modern medicine. It would not exist without capitalism. I like the fact that I can pick up a phone and call somebody who doesn't live in the same town as me. I think most of human progress in the last couple centuries would not have happened without capitalism. That doesn't mean it's all good. There are lots of externalities. There are lots of negative side effects, but we can see something as useful and a net positive without turning are back on the fact that it has a lot of flaws that need to be addressed.

26:30Right. I mean, I think that those same capitalist articles and books are being written and sold, and then they have advertising at the same time, which is all part of the same system. But I think you're pointing out something so important is that it's easy to create a straw man out of, especially about positive psychology, right? That you're gaslighting people or that, you know, I've seen lots of books that have been like about how I don't believe in this idea that people like me that would be like, you have to be happy all the time, right? And I've never heard a positive psychologist say that you should be happy all the time, right?

27:06I think that that actually leads to some detrimental effects within your life. Not only that, but you're also not in connection with reality. But I think what's important in the midst of that is that we then slot rattle back to the other side, which is when you feel like, oh, I can't pursue happiness directly, then there's nothing I can do. But that's like saying you don't pursue math directly, right? Like you have to pick up a pencil and you have to practice and you have to, you know, learn making lines and angles at the same time. Like there's lots of things that go into some of these skill sets.

27:39And what I would say is maybe skill set is just another word for belief here about if I take this action repeatedly, then I believe eventually it might create a positive effect or in the midst of a world in which I feel alone, that there might be weak ties that are here that are meaningful. This episode is sponsored by Quince. August is basically a reset button. Before the fall rush hits, it's the perfect moment to slow down and reassess, starting with the things we reach for every day. That's why I keep coming back to Quince. Their whole philosophy is fewer but better pieces. Premium materials, thoughtful design made to last.

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30:46Okay, let's go to the office hours segment of this conversation. I'm going to give you the mic and I will let you choose what question you want to ask. Welcome to my office hours. So one of the questions I had for you is that one of the biggest challenges we have with this work is getting businesses to measure something beyond just their business outcomes. For example, they tell me, don't use the H word. We don't want to hear about happiness, you know, relate back to engagement, right? But people were very engaged when the Titanic was going down. That's not necessarily our model for how we want everything.

31:21There's some other things we need to be asking. How do you convince, and you've done such a great work getting organizations to ask these larger questions. How do you convince organizations that you work with to ask questions beyond just the business outcomes? I think it's always tricky. I think all of us in the applied social science world, and especially all of us doing applied psychology, have confronted the, wait a minute. First of all, if it doesn't affect my bottom line, I don't want to measure it. And then secondly, if I have to measure something else, give me a buzzword that I don't have to argue with anyone is clearly related to performance.

32:01And I think I used to fight a lot of uphill battles. and I've increasingly found myself looking for tailwinds. And the clearest tailwind on this one is, at the end of the day, I want to understand what outcomes you care about. And usually what I'll hear is, first and foremost, we want to have productive people in teams who are delivering high, both quality and quantity of work. Like, great. So what do you think people's experiences need to be like in order to produce those outcomes? And then whatever comes back to me, I'll say, okay, look, We have a bunch of measures for that and we have terms for them, but I don't care what you call them.

32:40I don't care whether you call it quality of life at work. I don't care whether you describe it old school as job satisfaction. I don't care whether you refer to it as thriving or well-being or flourishing or happiness. At the end of the day, we're interested in the same things. And I want to make sure we measure those critical ingredients. So let's talk about what framing is going to work best for your organization and we'll make it work. And then the other part of it that often comes in is, as I'm pushing on that a little bit, I usually get some pushback and people say, but wait a minute, we don't just care about productivity.

33:13I'm like, oh, interesting. You're telling me this, tell me more. I would love to hear, what else do you care about? And they'll say, well, we wanna keep our best talent and we wanna attract the most capable people. I'll say, okay, well, what do you think drives whether somebody stays at a job or leaves? And when you look at the meta-analyses of the turnover literature, there's not a lot that matters more than liking the work you do and liking the people you work with. And so that becomes sort of added ammunition for saying, okay, again, whether you put it in the engagement bucket or the flourishing bucket or the well-being bucket, it's not just going to affect whether people are bringing creative ideas and persisting in the face of obstacles and giving their best effort at work.

33:58It's also in the long run going to drive, whether they stick around in your workplace or whether they jump ship to find somewhere else. And as you know well, the most talented people have the most options and it's the hardest to retain them. And so if you're not doing something to make sure that they are energized at work, then you are basically disincentivizing them to stay and you're asking them go find a job that cares more about you. That's been what the conversation has looked like for me. How is that different from what you end up doing? I have the same type of approach. like when we go into organizations, just with the Harvard students, when we wanted to get them to be interested in happiness research, we had to tell them how it improved their grades, right?

34:35So they'd be like, great. Because otherwise it's like, well, I'll be happy when I'm an investment banker or when I get this PhD or when I have something else. We had to relate it to what they cared about in the first place. And then once we've opened that door, then it allows us to start that process of evaluating what actually leads to the outcomes that we want within our lives. And some of those I think are the ones you described. It's like, do you have a best friend at work? Do you feel optimistic? Do you feel like your work is meaningful? Do you feel like there's something greater than you?

35:01But a few years ago, you and I were both speaking at a conference together and we got to do a dialogue with one another and it was great. And we turned it into a debate and I think I lost it at the end. And I'm curious if you've doubled down or if you've changed over time at all. But we were talking about the happiness advantage and one of the things you said you didn't buy, and I'm putting it stronger than you said, you said it much nicer. But what you feel like motivates you to perform well is this fear that I'm not going to be able to get this project done in time or the fear of, well, if I let these people down, if I don't get this book in, or the fear of failing causes you to drive to make sure you get that work actually done.

35:38And it butts up against that optimism or positivity moves you in that direction. And if it's true, how do we like, I don't want my kids to fear failure. But also when I look at these incredible athletes, the best ones always say, I hate losing. So I'm really curious how you synthesize it now. Yeah, this has been in the back of my mind, I think, since we had that debate. And I've been trying to reconcile the views. I think the easy way to do it is just say, look, there are individual differences. There are contingencies always. And for some people, we may need anxiety first and then optimism once they are prepared.

36:15And that the optimism too soon can be counterproductive. But then the point that you made was very persuasive, that if you don't have any optimism to begin with, you're not going to bother to study at all or to prepare at all. And so I think where I am right now, and tell me if you think this is right or wrong, is I think there's a temporal cycle where if the goal is optimal performance and also not being a miserable jerk, what we want is we want to start optimistic at the very beginning of a project or a goal so that you don't aim too low and you actually are motivated to try. And then as it comes time to put in the hard work of preparation, We want a little bit of worrying that things might not go well so that, you know, that complacency, if there's a possibility of complacency, it's thwarted off.

37:04And then once you're prepared, we want to replace any worry with optimism and confidence. And that would be sort of the, for me, the optimal cycle. What do you think? I think that you're right. And you know what? Oftentimes, what I tell people is that I would never give my talk on the happiness advantage at a funeral, right? Yes, I do think. I hope not. Right? I do think being positive leads to better outcomes. It's not the right time for it. And I think at some point in that temporal cycle that you're talking about, there has to be an intervention that shows that you're not alone, that there's outliers that have proven that even with those difficult circumstances, a positive change is possible, and that we can interrupt that cycle by changing those beliefs like my behavior matters.

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40:36Okay, let's go to a lightning round. Rapid fire questions. Goal is one sentence max answer. Are you ready? I'll try. Okay, first question. What do you think is the worst advice people get about becoming happier? I think the worst advice people get about becoming happier is that they have to ignore all the negative that's going on around them instead of reframing and looking for the positive amidst a world that doesn't look like it should. Nice. Okay, so you've spent the last few decades really internalizing a lot of interesting research. What's been the most surprising thing you've learned about how to raise happiness?

41:16The most surprising thing I've learned about happiness is that I thought a lot of the things that would prevent happiness in life were not preventers of it. Refugee displacement, poverty, bereavement of a child, that while it causes a loss of hope and optimism at some points, that the recovery of humans is incredible, allowing happiness to be possible, even in environments I never thought it could happen. What is an unpopular belief you hold? And I'm finding one of the most unpopular beliefs I hold is the inclusion of that final belief in my book, which is that there's something greater than you.

41:52And I included it in the book because for me, it means that there's a loving God. But for someone else, it could be that there's nature or that there's justice or that there's a sense of humanity or a universe that makes this more than just a collision of random atoms, which provides meaning and purpose and that our behavior matters and that we're not alone. Okay, you're organizing a dinner party of anyone alive or dead to try to figure out the secret to a life well lived. Who are you inviting? I would invite my favorite author, C.S. Lewis, because I have pulled so much of my own beliefs from his ability to synthesize his intellectual beliefs with his religious beliefs.

42:34Adam, actually, honestly, I would have invited you because I think that you wouldn't let us just rest our laurels. You would question it and allow us to go to deeper areas. And I've always loved your style, honestly. And the last person is this guy who writes me all the time from a homeless shelter. and he spent his whole life working at a homeless shelter and he could have done so much. He was the CEO and then he stopped doing it to help people. And he's written me because he's been writing down his gratitude every single day for like five years now. And he's gotten his team to do it. And I'm like, you're better at this than I am.

43:06And I wanna figure out how to love in the midst of pursuing happiness as well. Wow, incredible. I still want someone to run the experiment that I think at that conference we were at that might've been dreamed up by me, which is, I'll just tell our listeners briefly. I remember, Sean, you had done some amazing trials of interventions where you were able to change people's beliefs and behaviors with relatively quick training. And my immediate question coming out of some of those experiments was, how much of this is the training and how much of it is a Sean effect? Just that being around you is infectious and it's almost impossible not to be upbeat and optimistic after interacting with you.

43:52Have you figured out whether you're a placebo yet or is that still an experiment waiting to happen? We've cut myself out of the interventions. So we're able to pull, yeah. So I don't lead any of the interventions now, but we still see that we were able to work with all the public schools in Flint, Michigan and improve the optimism levels of teachers in the midst of inequality, discrimination, racism. And we were able to raise the test scores at these schools where they thought it was a failure factory. And we were able to work on how you can raise optimism, not alone, but with other people. And I wasn't there for any of those.

44:33I was just looking at the research on the backside of it. And it's extraordinarily exciting. We did it with hospital systems in the midst of COVID, where I wasn't the person providing the intervention. And what we looked at, and we looked at multiple interventions, But basically when people did try to create a work routine together that was positive and realized that they weren't alone, that that attempt to do it together dramatically lowered burnout rates in the midst of COVID in the same hospital system where burnout rates were skyrocketing because we did department by department. So we could see how beliefs could change even in places where we thought the story couldn't change, that the only narrative was that stress is tearing us apart and that we're alone.

45:15Love it. I still believe there's a Sean effect, but I'm glad to see that there is an effect of your training independent of you. Thank you. All right. Thanks, Sean. This was a delight. I look forward to many more conversations to come. Me too, Adam. Thank you. 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 Our technical director is Jacob Winnick, and our fact checker is Paul Durbin. Our team includes Eliza Smith, Roxanne Hilash, Banban Chang, Julia Dickerson, Tansika Sung Manivong, and Whitney Pennington Rogers.

45:56Original music by Hans Dale Su and Alison Leighton Brown.

46:04So I think it's a brilliant critique. It's the same one you use for give and take, right? Which is, it's great to be a giver, but at some point, you don't want to give too much. those people actually suffer at work. Stop using my own work against me, Sean. Oh, no, no. I think it's great. If I'm following you correctly, you're saying the police... Yay, we're on a podcast.

46:30There's a reason millions of people start their day with Morning Brew Daily. Each morning, we break down the biggest news in business from the latest tech headlines to why nobody can afford a house right now. all in a format that fits seamlessly into your day. You'll leave each episode of Morning Brew Daily smarter and ready to take on the world around you. I'm Toby Howell. And I'm Neil Freiman. And we're ready to show you that business news doesn't have to be boring. So join us on Morning Brew Daily, available wherever you get your podcasts.