Adam Grant On Hidden Potential And Measuring Yourself Against Yourself

0:00I got an amazing night's sleep last night. One, because my six-year-old fell asleep in the car at like six o 'clock and he transferred him from the car seat to the bed and it stuck, which is just magic. So he's in bed way earlier than normal. But I sleep really well every night because I have a Eight Sleep Pod 5 Ultra, which is Eight Sleep's best product. I've used Eight Sleep for many years now and it's just totally transformed how I sleep, made me sleep better, made my wife sleep better. It's amazing. So basically, Eight Sleep is this topper that goes over your mattress. It can heat and cool both sides separately.

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1:20Trust me, your body will thank you for this investment in better sleep, shipping to many countries worldwide. See details at 8sleep.com slash Daily Stoic. I'm picking my kids up from school today and then doing our weekly routine, which is I take them over to Whole Foods. We get all our groceries for the week. Then we have dinner. It's one of their favorite things to do. It's one of my favorite things to do. And then my wife loves it because she doesn't have to take care of it. This holiday season, whether you're a guest or hosting the big dinner Whole Foods market, has what you need to delight everyone at your table.

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2:15Welcome to the weekend edition of The Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers. We explore at length how these Stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend, when you have a little bit more space, when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal, and most importantly, to prepare for what the week ahead may bring.

3:08Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. class uh several years ago now an agent i know said hey i've got this author he has some questions about something could you get on the phone with him and uh i did i don't remember why exactly i did but i did and i got on the phone and it was the one and only adam grant who was a great author then and is a huge author these days but um we kicked it around for an hour i gave him some advice on marketing stuff he did a lot of it um and uh that was me giving right to quote his idea of give and take. But what I was really impressed by in the years since is all the things that Adam has given back.

3:49I get an email from him every couple months. Hey, this person's awesome. I think you should meet them. Hey, this person has a great new book out. I think you should support it. And I probably get emails from publicists even more consistently that are like, Adam Grant, blurb this new book. I think you want to check it out. Adam has always been a super generous advocate and a super generous advocate of other people's work. Even in today's episode, I had him on the podcast about his new book. You know what he was doing? He kept quoting and citing the studies and research ideas from other people's works.

4:22Because like me, like Seneca, I think he realizes that it doesn't matter where the idea comes from, what matters is if it is good, if it moves the needle, if it helps people. And I think that's a through line through Adam's wonderful books. He's the writer of Originals, Option B, Think Again, Give and Take. And he's got this new one, Hidden Potential, The Science of Achieving Greater Things. His books have sold millions of copies. His TED Talks have millions of views. He has a great podcast called Rethinking. And he's one of the most influential management thinkers in the world. He's Fortune 40 under 40.

4:57And he's an organizational psychologist at Wharton, where he's been a top-rated professor. I think that rating thing, I'm saying he's top rated. That's something that comes up in today's episode, something that I took out of this episode that I'm going to start using for sure. You got to check out Adam's new book, Hidden Potential, The Science of Achieving Greater Things. You can follow him on Instagram at Adam Grant. Follow him on Twitter at Adam M. Grant. Go to his website, adamgrant.net. And I think we've got a bunch of his books at The Painted Porch also. So thanks to Adam for doing the podcast.

5:27Enjoy.

5:34Been a busy promo cycle so far? It's heating up. Definitely. You know the drill. You were just at the 92nd Street Y, right? Week after next. Ah, okay. I was there yesterday or day before yesterday. They told me if they were coming or had just come. I interviewed Arnold Schwarzenegger on stage, which is a surreal, unusual experience. Amazing. Did you challenge him to like an arm wrestling contest? I absolutely did not. I just figured I'd lose. So even though it was also, you know, he's 76. Like in my mind, he's, he's just the same age all the time. I picture him. He's aged a little bit. He's like 48 now.

6:16Right. Yeah, exactly. Well, this is awesome. Okay. So I wanted to start with, there's this Greek expression. I'm sure you heard it when you were working on the book, but there's this Greek expression that character is fate, right? Or the other way of rendering is that character is destiny. And I have found that largely to be true, especially with other people. And yet, what we write about, what we do is predicated on the idea that character can change. So how do you think about that? Well, leave it to Ryan Holiday to begin by quoting the ancient Greeks. I would expect no less. That's my job. I love it.

7:00Yeah. I guess I have trouble with any argument that anything is destiny because it robs us of our agency and self-determination. I think, I guess my view on character has evolved. I used to think about it as a set of principles. Now I see it much more as a set of skills for translating your principles into practice. So I think that in that sense, if you take character as a set of learned skills for, you know, for enacting virtue, as opposed to just sort of claiming it, I guess you could say, I don't know, destiny or fate is still strong to me. I would say it has big consequences. And those consequences are underappreciated.

7:48What do you think? Well, I would certainly agree that character is predictive in the sense of if you are trying to look at someone, like investors talk about this, right? Are you betting on the idea or are you betting on the founders? And I think most investors talk about how if you find great people, eventually those people will succeed. Perhaps not on the first iteration of the idea or even that idea as a whole. It'll change and adapt. But if you found the right people, eventually they will be successful. And so I think of character in that sense as being predictive. Like if someone has the skills, if someone has the values, if someone has the commitment to being a certain way, more often than not, that's going to determine where they're going to end up.

8:36And I think that's actually not a contradiction to agency in the sense that you decide what you're going to cultivate and that that determines who you're going to be. Right. It's like that that Churchill line about how we shape our buildings and then our buildings shape us. It's like we shape our character and then that character shapes, you know, sort of who we're going to be and what we're going to do in big situations and small situations. Very well put. I would agree with that. But at the same time, I also see like when you go in sports, like is the Kyrie Irving experiment in Dallas going to work?

9:19I would say no, because it hasn't worked anywhere else because that character is that character. Right. And and I'm not even making a judgment on him as a person necessarily, Although he has said and done some abhorrent things. I'm saying more like he's a guy where drama and conflict and ego follows. And so wherever he goes, that's what will follow because character is destiny and fate in that sense. Yeah, that's really interesting. So I'm tempted to wax poetic on Kyrie and what impact he's had on these teams. But no, let me broaden out a little bit and say there's evidence on this. So there's a study of NBA teams looking at what happens when you put a narcissist on the court.

10:13And it turns out that the more narcissists you have on your team, the more likely your team is to stagnate over the course of the season. So the average team improves. Teams with a lot of big egos don't. And that's especially true if you have a narcissist in the point guard role who tends to control the flow of the game. so I think it's fair to say that you if you have somebody who puts their own ego above the team's mission that particular deficit of character is going to wreak havoc on the group and whether that's true of Kyrie I will leave it to the basketball analyst to judge well no you you said leave it to Ryan Holiday to quote the Greeks leave it of course to Adam Grant for me to make an offhanded sports observation and you have an exact study that confirms or contradicts that very idea.

11:03That's amazing. Well, I mean, it's in the job description, right? But credit to Emily Grijalva and her colleagues for doing that study. It's amazing, by the way. I should say it was so clever. They actually coded player narcissism by coding their tweets. So they found, lo and behold, it turns out that some players write things like, when I look in the mirror, what I see staring back at me is greatness. And different raters agree on what tweets signal narcissism. And then also, you know, if you had a shirtless photo of yourself on your feed, that was a signal that you thought you were pretty special.

11:41And the fact that you could take those data points and learn something about people's character and then track the growth or stagnation of their teams based on that, to me, that's astonishing. It is fascinating. And I think about this, like, is it the problem of the individual athlete? So you bring on a narcissist and is that narcissism then contagious? Or actually, is it something much more simple where it's the organization saying by hiring this person and then tolerating that behavior saying, hey, this is an environment in which narcissism is acceptable, right? So is it, I think this is actually what you see when a team makes an exception and brings on Antonio Brown or brings on someone who's been recently arrested or gets in trouble all the time or it hasn't worked in every other place they've been.

12:37Is it actually that person that is the problem or is it the organization stating its values and principles saying, hey, we've always talked about being a team of culture and doing the right thing, etc. And then now this guy who just got arrested for domestic violence is cheaper on the market, so we're going to go ahead and take advantage of that opportunity. You're now saying something about your character as an organization. You think about the Cleveland Browns and the signing of Deshaun Watson, giving a guy who was just caught up in some really nasty, gross, exploitative stuff the largest guaranteed contract in the history of football, that's also making a statement about the values far more than Deshaun Watson specifically would be doing.

13:26I think it's a really good distinction. And I think there's a case to be made for both. So I think empirically, the study I just mentioned clearly supports the former. So there seems to be a spillover effect of the player's own ego or lack of character on the rest of the team. So one of the reasons the teams with a bunch of narcissists or narcissistic point guards don't improve is that they struggle to coordinate. So the narcissist hogs the ball, you have a lower rate of assists, their plays get predictable, and you can track that in the data. I think what you're pointing out is probably a longer term risk, which is that a signal is being sent about what the enacted values are, which are different from the espoused values.

14:10So we say we stand for one thing, but we don't walk our talk. And over time, that means that players who have strong character are less likely to want to join the team. They're less likely to want to stay on the team. Their influence is stifled. I had an interesting conversation with Mark Cuban about this. We were talking about chemistry and culture and these dynamics. And he said, look, you can have one knucklehead on a team, but not two, at least in basketball. I can rein in one narcissist, particularly if I have a strong captain or if there's a star or a role model that everybody else looks up to who's going to stand for a different set of principles.

14:51What I can't do is contain the influence of two of them because then they start to take over the team. I have noticed that with the sports teams that I've gotten to know or the coaches that I've talked about, talked to, they, there is, it's, it's probably both a virtue and a vice that, uh, people in sports, especially the higher up at the different levels you get, they get really good at accommodating, adjusting for weird personalities, right? Because, uh, talent is so often coordinated with other extreme issues or personality traits, I'm impressed slash in some other cases dismayed with their ability to sort of see that person to isolate different personality traits.

15:43Whereas me as a human being, I go, that guy sucks, right? Or I hate him or her because of this thing that they did. But because I don't need anything from them in the way that a coach needs something from them, and I'm not scouring the talent market, I don't need to sort of compartmentalize the way that sports teams need to do. And I've always found this sort of in the talent world, managers and executives' ability to compartmentalize is really interesting. Well, it's interesting that you call it compartmentalizing because I wonder if there's a different way to frame it. So one of the things I've learned from personality psychology over the last decade and a half or so is that most of us talk about people in terms of their traits.

16:33So, you know, we can comment on one player whose character we admire, you know, being full of grit, discipline, determination, proactivity, being pro-social, putting the team above self. and then other players may be lacking those qualities. But one of the things you see is that over time, as people get to know someone up close, so if you think about teammates with each other or a coach with a player, and this is true also in our own work lives, in our own friendships, even in our marriages and relationships between parents and kids, the better you know someone, the less you see them in terms of their static traits and the more you see them in terms of if-then signatures.

17:14So, you know, instead of saying, you know, this person is lacking grit, you would say, well, I noticed there are certain situations where they're extremely tenacious and persistent and others where they seem to be lazy. And my job is to figure out the if that brings out the then that I want. And I think that that's a lot of what coaches are trying to do. They're trying to say, look, character skills can be situation specific. If I change the situation, I can activate some hidden potential that was not visible to a lot of people in this person. So the sports example that comes to mind for me is something Joe Dumars did on the Pistons, first with Dennis Rodman and then later with Rashid Wallace.

17:54And what was neat is he got to do this as a team captain and then as a general manager. I think the sheet example is the clearest one. And so, you know, Wallace would commit a technical foul in the second quarter. And then, you know, sort of everything goes downhill from there. And then occasionally he would just, you know, he would sort of flame out toward the end of the game and blow a game for the team. And Dumars sat him down and said, listen, I just can't have you committing a technical foul in the fourth quarter. If you need to let off some steam earlier in the game, if, you know, if you lose it in practice, okay.

18:32hey, but this is the boundary I'm setting. And that was trying to set some, I guess, some ground rules in place to say, look, he does have the capacity for self-control. It's not easy for him to exercise willpower every moment. So let me try to focus and channel a little bit. Let's get the best of him in the fourth quarter. That's when we really need him. And I think that kind of thinking is probably less common than it should be. Yeah, that's true. I guess where this all comes back to sort of real life, the version of this that we do is we go, I can fix him or her like in relationships, right?

19:14Like, yes, they've cheated on me a million times or yes, they treat me poorly, but I can fix them. They can change. Right. Or the person part of what part of their sort of cycle is they do stuff and then they go, I'm going to change. But then, you know, for the most part, people don't change. And so where character is this tricky thing is like, for the most part, you know, we're probably fooling ourselves if we tell ourselves that this person at 52 years old is going to become a transformatively different person. You know, their past behavior is probably going to determine their future behavior.

19:54And yet, as individuals, we want to and need to be able to believe that we as a 52 year old can get our shit together. We can stop drinking. We can lose weight. You know, we can start pursuing our dreams. We can become less, you know, intimidated, whatever it is. It's like this idea that I guess this is also a little compartmentalization. We have to be sort of pragmatic and realistic about other people. And yet we want to believe and need to believe deeply in our own agency and ability to change or else what point is there in waking up every day? Well, that is a paradox for sure. I think though that the fundamental problem is that we forget, it's not that other people are unwilling or unable to change.

20:42It's that they rarely want to change in the way we want and at the moment we want. And so we confuse the fact that we're bad at motivation and persuasion when it comes to other people with the conclusion that people don't change. And the reason that you can, I think, maintain the belief that you're capable of change is that you have full control over your own behavior, unlike other people's. And you also can persuade yourself with reasons you find compelling. Like every time you make a case that somebody else should change, you're actually persuading someone else, which is you, and you're listening to someone you already like and trust.

21:22So I think the big question that raises then is, given that we only have control over our own character, how do we develop it? And I guess when I was writing Hidden Potential, there was an almost endless list of character skills I could have dove into. I was sort of overwhelmed by, okay, where do you draw the line? Which ones are important, which ones aren't? And what I did was I ended up reviewing the evidence on the character skills that are most important for sustained growth. for allowing people not just to achieve their performance goals, but to maintain progress over time. And there were three that stood out in the research over and over again.

22:03And I've come to think of them as seeking discomfort, being a human sponge, and becoming an imperfectionist. And I think these are skills that we can develop at any age. The evidence is clear that we can even teach entrepreneurs in their 40s and 50s to embrace these skills and that their businesses actually grow at faster rates when they learn them. And we can talk more about that. But I'd love to dig into seeking discomfort and being a sponge and being an imperfectionist a little bit and see where you come down on these, because I think there's some stoic overlap. Well, I agree. And I would say, I think you actually just there gave a pretty good definition of stoicism, or at least practical stoicism, when you said, we can't control other people's character, but we can control our own.

22:58And so we might as well focus on that, on improving ourselves, which to me, there's this idea that stoicism is kind of pessimistic and that we kind of make certain assumptions about other people, or we resign ourselves to certain facts about the world. But I actually think it's paired with a kind of an optimistic view of our own agency sort of inside that. So it's this idea that, hey, I don't control other people, but I control how I respond to other people. I don't control what's happening in the world, but I control who I'm going to be inside of that world. I think there's something really great about the idea of like, look, I'm going to leave other people's character to themselves, however they want to do it.

23:39And I'm going to assume that I have a pretty good sense of possibilities inside my own, and that's where I'm going to spend the vast majority of my energy. Thanks to Toyota Trucks for sponsoring this episode. When I bought my ranch in 2015, out here in Vastro County, I drove my car about halfway down the dirt road that we live on, thought this isn't going to work, stopped, parked it, walked the rest of the way home, borrowed my wife's car, drove into Austin and bought a truck. What I bought was a Toyota Tacoma. And this truck wasn't just transportation getting me to and from my house. It unlocked a whole different style of living for us, not just on the ranch, but in our little Texas towns.

24:25There were places I could go now that I couldn't go before, especially out here in the piney forests, through the fields, and on the unpaved roads like the one that I lived in. We got to go deep into the hill country's wild beauty. We've driven all the way out to East Texas. We've driven across the country. And by we, I mean not just my wife, but both my kids who I drove home from the hospital in that truck. Toyota trucks are built for those who understand that the best adventures happen when you're willing to veer off course. Because you never know when you'll end up on a Toyota adventure detour.

25:03And of course, this is stoicism too, because every detour, every obstacle is an opportunity. But it's helpful if you can handle the difficulty inherent in that. If you've got the resilience and the right companion to make it wherever the road takes you. Discover your uncharted territory. Learn more at toyota.com slash trucks slash adventure dash detours. You probably heard the headlines about all the different cuts to foreign aid and food benefits. This is having a profound impact on the world's poorest people and the world's poorest communities. but you know just hearing about that that's not what stoicism is about stoicism is to me what you're going to do about it and that's where give well comes in give well is trusted by tens of thousands of donors each year because they provide free and independent research that helps you understand how to have a big impact give well has spent the last 18 years research in global health and poverty alleviation and they direct funding to the highest impact opportunities over 150 ,000 donors have already trusted GiveWell to give more than two and a half billion dollars over the last several years.

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26:44That's how they know that you heard about GiveWell from The Daily Stoic, and you'll get your donation matched. That's GiveWell.org. Code The Daily Stoic to donate or find out more. I think that makes a lot of sense, and I think, you know, at some level, it's the best way to influence other people anyway, which is to manage your response. Of course. Yeah. I mean, that goes to the culture thing we were talking about earlier, right? It's like the handful of cases where you have seen a problematic athlete thrive in a new city or a new team. it's usually not the environment where the whole system is revolving around them, right?

27:27It's usually they are plugging into a strong culture, a strong system, a strong tradition or legacy, and they're subsuming themselves in something larger than themselves. And they are watching those ideas be modeled by their teammates and everyone else in the organization. you. Exactly. And I think what's unfortunate for the rest of us is that most of us don't have the chance to plug into that kind of system. And so we have to create it for ourselves. And I think some of that is the direct work of building character skills. And some of that is being able to piece together the coaching and mentoring that you need to fill gaps in your own knowledge and expertise, which is not quite as complicated as I think it feels in the moment.

28:16Well, let's start with embracing discomfort because I would agree, you know, most good things are on the other side of work that you're willing to do or risks that you're willing to take. And I could see how that is a predictive character trait, a person who is seeking out new things, new situations, new opportunities. They are going to grow more than a person who sticks with what they know and where they're comfortable. Yeah, I think, you know, it's often, I guess a lot of people have made the point in various ways that discomfort is necessary for growth. I think what we overlook there is there's a knowing doing gap.

28:56So we may all recognize that that's true. But we don't put ourselves in enough uncomfortable situations. We don't do it often enough. We don't do it intensely enough to really move the needle on our own learning and development. So maybe to take a personal example, when I was a teenager trying to become a springboard diver, despite a severe lack of talent, I would come out of the water and my coach, Eric Best, would give me a change to make. And I would probably make 10 % of the adjustment that he would ask for. And I wouldn't make a bigger change because it felt too uncomfortable. I think a simple example would be when learning to do a reverse one and a half.

29:40So you jump off the board forward and then you do a backward flip and a backward dive. I would have my head back trying to see the water behind me so that I would land in my head as opposed to a back smack or a belly flop. But if your head is back, you can't get into the smallest ball and that slows down your rotation. And so you don't make the dive as well. And so Eric would say, put your head in. And what I would do is go from leaning my head straight back to maybe tilting my chin down a tiny bit, but I'm still in this wide open position instead of in a tight ball. And after watching me do that over and over again, Eric would say, make it feel wrong.

30:17You have to make it feel wrong in order to get it right. And I was so caught up in the idea of not feeling uncomfortable that I wasn't willing to make the correction. And I think what I learned through that experience is that most of the time when people give us constructive criticism or even coaching, we overreact to it. And then we undercorrect because of the discomfort. And if instead you could say, I'm going to overcorrect, I'm going to take the feedback to heart and do the most uncomfortable version of this. then I may actually miss the mark, but at least then I can find the sweet spot in the middle.

30:56Whereas if I'm constantly under correcting and avoiding the discomfort, the progress is going to be much more incremental and I'm actually going to stunt my own growth. Yeah, it's like you're getting zapped for being over here. So then you go over here and you're getting zapped. So the person's like, I'm just going to stay over here. I'm not going to, I think you're worried about over correcting because by definition, it implies needing to be corrected again. Yeah, it definitely implies that. And it's also just uncertain. It's unfamiliar. I don't know what that's going to feel like. In the diving case, I might get lost in midair.

31:33This might really hurt. And I don't want to have to grapple with, okay, it's either bad or it's uncertain. Both of those are undesirable. What I'm overlooking is that if I keep under correcting, then I'm never going to make a fundamental leap. No pun intended. And that, I think, stands in the way of progress. Well, one of the tricky things about this is like when you're younger and when you're earlier in your career, people have more power and control over you. Right. So you have teachers, you have coaches, you have your parents. You are constantly sort of submitting for approval and needing approval to do what you want to do to get to the next level.

32:16But the sort of paradox of success is that you get more and more autonomy, more and more independence, more and more control. And we tend to spend that capital that we've acquired on comfort, right? Like, I was just thinking about this as I've done all my books with the same publisher. And my editor at that publisher is now the publisher himself. So basically, nobody can tell me what to do with my books anymore, which is something I thought I always wanted, right? In the sense that I don't like it when someone says, do it this way, or I don't like this. I didn't like, you know, getting tons of notes back on every manuscript and having to fight these battles about what I wanted to say and how I wanted the book to be and look.

33:05So as I've succeeded and sold more and more books, that has gone away. But that also puts you in the pleasant but also dangerous situation of having fewer guardrails and checks and fewer things that challenge you and you get better for making that challenge. So I've had to now, I'm now in the process of going, okay, how do I bring in coaches or outside editors or more feedback to compensate for the fact that my success has afforded me less feedback and more comfort? Well, I think the mistake that a lot of people make in that position, and it's a fortunate position to be in, so congratulations, Ryan.

33:46It's a luxury that very few people get to enjoy the comfort of. But I think the mistake that a lot of people make in that position is they realize, okay, I need feedback. And they start to ask for it. And then they end up with basically two categories of useless information. They end up with a bunch of praise from cheerleaders who are only celebrating their best self. and then a bunch of complaints and objections from critics who are only attacking their worst self. And I don't think either of those are conducive to growth. I think what you want is not a cheerleader or a critic, but a coach, which is somebody who recognizes your hidden potential and then helps you become a better version of yourself.

34:29And the big question is, how do you get someone to coach you? That's the hard part. You can ask an editor to do that, but you might get a bunch of praise or a bunch of criticism as opposed to a bunch of development. And the research that I've been reading on this has a really simple and useful technique, which is instead of asking for feedback, start asking for advice. When you ask for feedback, people evaluate what you did yesterday. When you ask for advice, they tell you what you can improve tomorrow. And I think it's probably more powerful than a lot of people realize because we're usually in the habit of assuming that whatever people tell you about your existing work is going to feed into what you're going to be able to develop as you move it forward.

35:13But it's a very different question to say, evaluate what I've done and tell me what's right about it or wrong with it than it is to say, well, what suggestion do you have for me? And I think it's much more actionable to frame the question that way. So curious about whether that's how you've approached coaching or whether you have other ways to get people to give you useful input. Yeah, I often ask people when I send them my books, I go, what do you think I should cut? Right? What isn't doing it for you? Where do you feel like it's dragging? Because, you know, it's not helpful for me to hear, oh, it's great.

35:50I loved all of it. Right? That's not information I can do anything with. And so it's not that I'm exactly looking for criticism in the sense that I'll get random criticism from people on the internet that don't like me. I think you're right. That's a useless category of criticism. But I do want to be challenged. I obviously think it's good or I wouldn't have written it. So it's helpful for me to hear from people what they think isn't up to the same level or standard because maybe they're right, maybe they're wrong. I'll have to make that calculation, but I want to hear more about what wasn't working for them.

36:27And that's uncomfortable for me than it is to hear about all the things that were going great for them. And what you're doing here is being a sponge, which I love how naturally you segwayed into the second character skill. I think a lot of people, the image of a sponge conjures up this idea of absorptive capacity that I just, you know, I want to soak up every piece of information that's available to me. If you study sea sponges, as everyone should do, clearly, one of the things you find is that they're not just good at absorbing, they're also good at filtering out harmful particles and keeping in nutrients.

37:04And that's part of how they survive. And I think that in the process of trying to learn and grow, we all need good filters. So you just described one example of a filter, which is you're seeking targeted advice. You're worried that the book is either too long or there's content that's not going to resonate. And so you want to know what should be cut. And you're asking people basically to filter for you in that sense. You could also think about filters in terms of what are your sources credible on? So there are some people that you're probably going to go to for insight on your sports examples who are not going to be quite as qualified on the entrepreneurship ones and vice versa.

37:42And I don't think we're nuanced enough when we think about getting feedback. We tend to sort of weigh all opinions equally as opposed to saying, how well does this person know the content? How also well do they know me and my goals or my audience? And then some of those perspectives can be discounted. Others are going to be much more relevant. Yes, that's right. I think about this with people getting advice from their parents. and now I think about it now that I have kids is like the number one goal of a parent is to keep their child safe. So when you're asking your dad for advice on what you should do with your career or whatever, at the end of the day, you know, they're not thinking, how do I help my son or daughter maximize their fulfilling their potential or maximize for happiness?

38:31You know, at the end of the day, their advice is usually going to be colored by how do I make sure that they're okay? Right. And so that's really helpful advice. But you and you but you need to counterbalance your parental safe advice with the advice of a mentor, the advice of your friends, the advice of professors, etc. You've got to understand the agenda. And I mean that in a positive way, the agenda or the priorities of the people that you are consulting about this thing. Yeah, I think that's, gosh, it's amazing how common this is for parents to give advice that's essentially avoiding downside risk and missing out on upside potential.

39:14And I think that the hard part is that there's not one metric for potential. And so you often don't know what's the opportunity cost here. Um, you know, given that I might've lacked talent in this area today, or this task is hard for me or I haven't achieved success yet. Um, is that a good predictor of where I'm going to go in five years? I don't know. And I think this is, um, this is probably one realm in which it's helpful to have in addition to coaches, some judges. So what I want in a judge, and this, this comes right out of my diving days, and this is the last diving example I will give you, I promise, is I found it enormously helpful to every time I came out of the water just to get a score, zero to 10.

40:02Sure. And when I transitioned from sports to the world of work, I was like, where are the judges? I don't know if this is any good. And so I started asking people, I would give them drafts and just say, can you rate this zero to 10? And then I started doing it when I would give speeches too. I'd come off stage and just say, what was your score? Zero to 10. And then my job, whether I got a three and a half or a seven, was to ask, how can I get closer to 10? But also, I was taking that information as an indicator of how close to my potential am I here? If somebody gave me a three and a half, that's a sign that I either need to make a dramatic overhaul, or maybe I'm not quite in the realm where I have the highest possible ceiling on what I'm capable of achieving.

40:52If I got a bunch of six and a half, sevens, eights, I feel like I'm in the ballpark, I can tinker more, and I'm not completely missing the mark of where I'm focusing my energy. And I think a lot of people don't ask for that kind of judging because they're afraid of the answer. And the thing to remember there is if people are making those judgments in their head anyway. It's helpful for you to have that gauge so you can figure out. It's like a compass. It tells you whether you're on a good path or not. I actually, I'm going to borrow that from you because I have found specifically with speaking, given that it is a thing that most people do not like doing and are very intimidated by, it is, and they're sort of like, I'm glad you're up there instead of me, right?

41:39It's extremely hard to get good feedback on it, right? This sounds egotistical, but like, if you just walk off stage, most people are going to go, you were great, right? And they mean, yeah. Almost everyone says that. And yes, you're a professional, right? You are much better at speaking than the average person. So that's not an unreasonable comment and maybe their expectations or standards are low, but also it's polite. They're following rules of politeness. You just got on their stage. They don't want to hurt your feelings. And to your point, because of the self-consciousness that a lot of people have about public speaking, they're especially reluctant to maybe be a little more candid with you.

42:21Yeah. And so in the absence of that feedback, you don't know what's working and what's not working, Right. And this is, you know, I think there's a lot of areas where this is true. You know, how how often is an employee going to give the owner or of a company or their boss honest feedback about how they're doing? Right. No one's going to tell Vladimir Putin that he's doing a bad job. No one's going to tell Joe Biden that he's doing a bad job to his face. Right. He might be able to get it in a poll or might be able to get it from a critic. But for the most part, you know, when you do something that's hard, it is inherently isolating and inherently reinforcing of that kind of comfort zone of, you know, feeling like you're doing well.

43:08And you may be doing well, but you're missing out on all the areas you could be doing much better. Exactly. And I think there, I mean, I've had this experience time and again. I had it yesterday, actually. I got off stage and I said, how did that go? And the first three people I saw said, that was great. You were great. And I really loved it. yeah and i just started laughing and said how is that helpful to me i'm here to figure out how i can how i can get better and also the next time i speak here i would like to know how i could you know how i could improve and yeah i didn't get a lot at first and then i said okay give me a rating and then you know somebody said eight i was like okay thank you but that's not a 10 so clearly you see room for improvement.

44:00What's the one thing you would change if you were me? And then I started getting a couple of suggestions. I got a, oh, you might want to diversify your examples and images for an international audience as one example. I'm like, okay, good. Yeah, I can definitely work on that. And then I started getting a few other suggestions and then people see your first reaction that you're actually taking it as an opportunity to improve as opposed to defend your ego. And then they're like, oh, okay. It's psychologically safe for me to challenge this person a little bit. Now let me give my point of view. And then hopefully the cycle continues from there.

44:36Well, one thing I thought of earlier when you were talking about comfort zones, and then now we're talking about being a sponge, again, maybe a more relatable or practical example I would think about, it's like somebody starts a company, it succeeds, and they're setting up their board of directors, right? Are you assembling a board of directors that are loyal to you and rubber stamp what you want to do? In some ways, that's advantageous. But as far as growing, avoiding potential icebergs, having a good long-term vision, etc., the leader needs to be challenged, needs to be held accountable, needs other sources of expertise, advice, wisdom, experience.

45:23And so there's this tension, right, between sort of who you bring on to give you advice. Are you asking people, are you hiring a group of cheerleaders or are you highlighting, are you bringing on, you know, actually a team or a group of people that will make you and the organization better? Yeah, this is another knowing doing gap where I think most leaders recognize the importance of having those coaches ready to hold up a mirror and then tell them how they can do better tomorrow. But find it really hard to put that into practice on a regular basis, in part because it hurts, in part because I think they're often focused on optimizing the wrong things.

46:09So if your sole metric, for example, is growth as a company, like, all right, I want to maximize my revenue, kind of tune out feedback and advice that's not relevant to that goal. And I think one of the systematic mistakes that I see a lot of organizations make is they promote people for being goal oriented. And then they have a bunch of leaders who are at risk for tunnel vision and who are great at hitting their targets and forget that it's actually possible to fail by hitting your targets because they were not the right targets or they weren't the complete set of targets. Yeah, I mean, even putting aside goal, being goal oriented, I think this ties back to what we're talking about with athletes.

46:58But, you know, Uber is a good example of a company, in my understanding, that really just looked at the results people were delivering, right? And they hired a series of very talented, very ambitious, very driven, very successful coders, executives, etc. But in the end, if we want to say character is fate, you know, set themselves up for a series of scandals and problems because what wasn't there was, you know, any sort of larger commitment to certain values. Right. Everything was about the bottom line, which is good, but can set you up for making, ironically, decisions that are very bad for the bottom line in the long term.

47:44Yeah, I think the challenge of seeing into the future, obviously, is probably out of the wheelhouse of most leaders. And I guess what I might say on this is that it's really easy to get stuck in a short-term mindset for reasons that people are often unaware of. So we talk a lot about the pressures of quarterly earnings reports. we talk a lot about the problems with short-term metrics. I think what we forget is that there's not a lot of opportunity to try to figure out, okay, what failures are acceptable and which ones are unacceptable. So I guess we all manage to what's measured at some level.

48:34This has been well-established over many decades, but not all measures are equally important. Um, and I think when you get rewarded and promoted over and over again for being successful, um, you start to feel, to fear failure. Um, not only, you know, fearing that you're going to feel like a failure, but also the image risk, the reputation and career damage you could suffer is really hard. And one of the things I've, I've watched some organizations do is, is try to change, um, the systems around that. So Google X, for example, has a really interesting model where when you're going to start a new project, if you were going to try to power the internet via balloon, or if you were going to build self-driving cars, or as one manager dreamed up, if you were going to try to turn seawater into fuel, some of these projects are not going to pan out.

49:26And what you don't want to do is fall into a trap that psychologists call escalation of commitment to a losing course of action, where you bet on the project, and then it becomes your baby. and you can't admit that your baby is ugly, and you end up wasting more time and more resources on it. So what X does is they ask you to identify kill signals, which are signs that maybe this investment is not going to pan out. And you plan them at the beginning of a project so that you can catch them if three or four months in, one of those kill signals is flashing, that's a cue that it might be time to pull the plug as opposed to wasting the next five years on this project.

50:05and I think that those kinds of incentives to me make a lot of sense. I'm sure you've heard a lot of companies in Silicon Valley say, celebrate failure. I don't know about you, Ryan. I do not want to throw a party when I fail. I'm like, this would be the ideal moment to be able to turn into an actual bear and hibernate for a few months and then come out when I've invested. But what we could do here is normalize. You're not going to celebrate your book selling zero copies. Yeah, that would be terrible. Like nobody wants to celebrate that ever.

50:41Yeah, you're not. And especially if, you know, failure, the actual shipping of the thing takes a long time, right? It's like, how many books are you going to write in your life? Not more than a dozen probably, right? And so to celebrate one of them failing, you know, you don't get that many at bat. So it is also about, I think, finding those, as you said, finding the things along the way that allow you to not go all the way to the end of the road to learn that that was a failure or that that was the wrong direction. Well, it's almost here. Christmas is just a couple of days away and maybe you're scrambling.

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53:09Exactly. SimSick can cause it the instead of small wins, the strategy of small losses. And I think it's a great invitation to say, what are the small experiments that I could run where the costs of failure are low, but the benefits of learning are high. And so this is, I guess for me, this is a big part of what it means to be an imperfectionist, to say, I do not need to get a 10 on every project I do, but I should have a different bar depending on the importance of the project I'm doing. So when I write a book, that's a massive project to your point. My tolerance for failure is extremely low. And so I won't publish it until my committee of judges independently gives it all nines.

53:50But a social media post, I'm perfectly happy to put out a six, six and a half and learn from that and iterate. And that's one sort of critic cheerleader mechanism that I can usually surface some coaching from. But this is really hard to do if you expect to succeed on everything that you launch. And I think the expectation that you never fail is a sign that you're staying too far in your comfort zone. You're not putting yourself in a position to really soak up any new information. And a lot of that stems from excessive perfectionism, where I think the expectation is that if I have any flaw, if I make any mistake, that failing is going to make me a failure.

54:36And I think the sooner we can dissociate those ideas, the easier it is to experiment and keep learning. Yeah. I mean, with writing, you find, hey, if the book is the first time you are surfacing these ideas to a large group of people, that's a huge bet that you just made, right? But if you have been talking about it and making videos about it and having dinner conversations about it and doing papers, if you have been workshopping that idea in public for an extended period of time, it's a much safer bet. And you still could be wrong, but the chances of you totally whiffing it are much lower because you have been testing it along the way as opposed to putting it all on this one giant shot that you have perfected.

55:32You have gone over every single word, every single sentence. Your perfectionism was there, but you may have been perfecting something that was bound to fail. And you don't know one way or the other because you've been doing this all in private. Spot on. And whenever I talk with people about this, about the importance of putting some of your ideas out there and then learning from the advice you get and hopefully then not taking the giant risk that you're describing. There's always somebody who says, but what if somebody steals my idea? And I'm curious about your reaction to this. My first thought is, if you're afraid of somebody stealing your idea, you probably don't have a lot of ideas.

56:21Or it's not a very good idea. Yeah, it's not going to work out. There are very few people who ever made it having just one idea. Sure. Well, what I would say is if the idea is stealable, it's probably not a very robust or groundbreaking or big idea. Right. So, you know, my books are not solely dependent on the concept. It's the concept plus execution, plus my platform, plus a bunch of other things. Right. If it's just this sort of concept, well, then, yeah, I guess someone could steal it. But I'm trying to do things, ideally, that actually can't be stolen because only I could do them. Right. Or there's that saying like, don't worry about people stealing their ideas.

57:15If it's truly an innovative idea, you'll have to ram it down people's throats. Understanding that actually most great ideas, most breakthrough things require a lot of convincing and a lot of salesmanship to get to pull off. And so theft is the least of your concerns. Your biggest concern is indifference or that you're wrong. Those are the things that keep me up at night, is that I'm excited about something that people are not excited about, or my take on it is wrong for a variety of reasons. I'm not worried about, let's say, somebody else writing a book about how ego is bad, or somebody else writing a book about overcoming obstacles.

58:02That's not what's going to make this thing succeed or fail. No. And in fact, you would be the first to point out other people have written books about those topics, but they didn't make the same points that you made. They didn't bring the stories to life in the way that you did. And they didn't land in the same way that yours have. I mean, the number of people that I hear, particularly in the sports world, quoting Ego as the enemy on a weekly basis is stunning. And that's a testament to the fact that you took a timeless idea that has been talked about for thousands of years and you presented it in a way that struck a chord with people that many other attempts hadn't.

58:43that's very nice thank you i i think you you made a note of that sort of early in this interview and that you were quoting somebody else's research right your books are not uh a hundred percent the discoveries of adam grant and his team right a lot of what you're doing is making connections between other people's work right which the best stuff does so so it's really not a stealable thing I think the best work is not stealable because the best work is a unique combination of things that only that person could have been interested in or made those connections for. Yeah, I think in that sense, we probably put too much of a premium on discovery and not enough on synthesis and explanation.

59:32Yes. And I mean, there's so many examples of this in the idea genre. I remember getting an early copy of James Clear's book and asking, do we need another habit book? There was already Charles Duhigg, The Power of Habit. It was hugely successful. I don't know that there's a market for another one of these. And I remember writing my blurb and thinking, yeah, it'll be really interesting to see what happens. This book is extremely well done. And I think Atomic Habits has to be the most successful idea book of the last decade. Probably. Yeah. And you're right. I mean, James isn't a researcher, a sort of an academic in any way.

1:00:20None of the findings in there are scientifically groundbreaking. But the packaging and the idea and the platform and the community, all the things that went into it, that's what makes that book what it is. Yeah. Yeah, this is making me wonder. I wonder how generalizable this is. So yeah, I think we're both strong believers that execution matters more than people think. And good ideas themselves don't go anywhere. I think that's true for entrepreneurs. Certainly, in the research I've read on this and the startups I've invested in and advised, I have seen many entrepreneurs with great ideas fail to execute and they go nowhere.

1:01:05I've seen lots of entrepreneurs with halfway decent ideas who are great at execution, who have built billion dollar companies. And I guess that goes back to the point that you started on, which is I want to bet on the character of the founder more than I do invest in the quality of the idea, because founders with great character skills are going to develop an idea that's decent into something that actually has real potential. Well, and I think that that should be a good reminder for everyone of the third thing you're talking about, about not being a perfectionist. If your view of the world is that things succeed because they are perfect or because they were the absolute right thing at the right time in the right moment, that's a much more intimidating bar than the bar of, hey, actually, no, it's things being pretty good.

1:01:55It's things being different. It's things being unique. And then that person really hustling, really committing, really developing the connections, really building the community. If you see it as part of a larger package, suddenly I think it feels much more attainable to you, but it's also much more actionable to you. You can get started on that and start the process now. If your view of Atomic Habits is that James Clear is the single greatest writer of all time. And that is the best written book of the last decade. You're going to spend a lot of time despairing at the keyboard than if you're like, no, James discovered an intersection of a bunch of stuff, spent a long time building a really cool platform, came up with a great title.

1:02:44If you see it as this larger thing, all of which are, if not in your, although not in your comfort zone, certainly within reach for most people, then pulling something like that off feels much more attainable and realistic than seeing it as some gift from the gods. This makes me think about the common phrase, the perfect is the enemy of the good. And I think what you've just described speaks to that. But I think we also need to remember that pursuing perfect is the enemy of growth. Because if your expectation is that you're going to deliver something that's the best, then you're not going to try anything, that you're not sure how it's going to work.

1:03:33You're not going to tinker. You're not going to pilot. And ultimately, you're going to be stuck in the narrow zone where you're already excellent and miss out on the potential that's not visible to you yet. Yeah. And look, I think this applies in all facets of life, right? Like if you're trying to be the perfect parent, you're not only going to fail, you're not going to feel very good about yourself. But if your goal is to be a better parent than you were yesterday, to be a better parent than you were a year ago, to be better than your own parents, you know, that is an iterative, actionable, and I think, realizable goal.

1:04:12And the best part about it is that it creates its own momentum in a way that comparing yourself against the perfect is the exact opposite. So instead of waking up every day and feeling like shit, you wake up every day and you go, look at how much better I am. Look at the progress I'm making. Look at how things are better. And that's really, I think, the critical difference. Yeah. I think the mistake that perfectionists make is they review their mistakes and then they shame their past self, forgetting that the whole point of reviewing your mistakes is to educate your future self. And I know it's easier said than done, but to ask, okay, the things that I screwed up as a parent or a colleague or as a friend yesterday, what can I learn from those to do better tomorrow, I think is a really critical question.

1:05:01And it's probably one that requires a little bit of self-compassion, which I've always thought was a squishy word and a little bit of a fluffy concept, but the research is pretty consistent suggesting that all the things that we thought came from, the good things we thought came from self-esteem, you know, confidence, motivation, growth, they're actually much more rooted in self-compassion. Being able to say, I'm only human, instead of like, wow, I'm a mistake, or I made a huge mistake, everyone makes mistakes. And that I think is what it means to be a daily stoic. Well, in one of Seneca's letters, he's talking to his friend Lucilius and he says, you know, how do I know I'm making progress in philosophy?

1:05:48And he says, I know it because I have become a better friend to myself. And I find that to be so beautiful. You know, he's not saying I know I've made progress because look at all these things I've accomplished. He's not saying I know I've made progress because look at how many fewer mistakes I'm making. he's saying, you know, I beat the shit out of myself a little bit less, right? Like I, I, I talk myself up a little bit more. I hold myself accountable because friends do that too. I think self-compassion is a great word that you used. You know, if, if, if your driving engine is how inadequate and inferior you feel, you know, maybe that'll keep you going forever, but it's going to be a miserable ride.

1:06:30So it's more like you're motivated and inspired by the progress you're making to make more progress. Yeah, I like that a lot. That's very meta. And I think it reminds me of, I guess, of something that a lot of people struggle with that I've struggled with a ton, which is I feel like every time you achieve something, your expectations rise. And then pretty soon you start to take for granted what you've accomplished. So I remember, I guess I even was guilty of this. When my second book came out, a friend asked, what are you doing to celebrate? And I was like, nothing. I'm a writer. We write books.

1:07:07That's what we do. I'm just doing my job. I'm not going to throw a party for that. And she said, exactly as you were just saying, how many books are you going to write in your career? This is a big milestone and you need to market. And I should know better as a psychologist. But it hit me that I can't really stop my expectations from rising. And in fact, I want them to rise because that's part of what motivates me to keep aiming higher and aspiring to improve and grow. What I can do is get in touch with a version of myself that had more reasonable expectations. And so the mental time travel exercise that I've become a fan of is to ask, okay, if somebody had told me five years ago that I was going to publish a book, let alone a second book, and that people were going to read it, I would have been overjoyed.

1:08:01And so I can remember that I've made that younger version of myself proud. yeah my michael dell told me his motto is pleased but never satisfied and i like the tension between those ideas right obviously if you're never satisfied you're going to keep going and going and going um and that's what makes a champion right they they look at the super bowl they just won and they go but i was really bad in the second quarter next year i want to get better but if the reward for that engine is that you never get to enjoy the rewards of what you accomplished, that's a pretty empty, sad way to live too. So I love this idea of being pleased and content, and at the same time, not being satisfied and knowing you can and will do a little bit better.

1:08:51And that tension is really where it's at. That is such a compelling juxtaposition, pleased but not satisfied. I'm taking that one home. I do want to call out one thing that I think people often get wrong, which is your Super Bowl example. Okay, yeah, we won, but I didn't like my second quarter, so I want to exceed that next time. I think we expect progress to be basically an upward arc, but it's not. And it's not just because everybody encounters setbacks. It's because when you encounter a setback, just getting back to where you were demonstrating resilience is a form of growth. Sure. Sure. So I look at, I look at a Tom Brady, for example, and people talk about a comeback, um, in his early forties.

1:09:41I'm like, no, it is growth. First of all, I mean, the objective growth, his 40 yard dash at 40 was faster than his 40 yard dash at 20. That's insane. Um, that, that is growth, um, in, in the face of decline. Um, it should, that should not be physically possible. And it makes you wondering what the hell he was doing when he was 20, by the way. But that aside, it's also growth to say, you know, given the various challenges I face, given the way that my body has been peed up, can I get back to the level I was at a few years ago? That in and of itself is progress. And I think too many people see it as a comeback as opposed to a moment of improvement.

1:10:22Yeah. Or they see, you know, so your, your fifth book doesn't sell as much as your first book. Does that mean it's not as successful? It's like, actually know that you're still even remotely relevant five books in is itself an accomplishment that you, that you kept going. You didn't get complacent and, you know, rest on your laurels is itself an accomplishment. And so, yeah, it feels weird to say you have to grade on a curve, but you do have to grade on a curve and you have to see these things in the context of where they actually sit, not compared against some perfect ideal and not compared against other people.

1:11:02But as you say in the book, you measure yourself against yourself. That's really how you fulfill your potential, right? That's what we're trying to do. We're not trying to fulfill objective potential. We're trying to fulfill our potential or our hidden potential. And if we lose sight of that, I think it makes us uncomfortable, but in a bad way. Yeah, that's very well put. Well, Adam, this was amazing. I love your stuff as always. And hopefully we can do this in person someday. I will look forward to that. Thanks for having me, Ryan.

1:11:55so

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