952: Adam Grant | The Science of Tapping Into Your Hidden Potential

22:41And I get it. They grew up in a country where if you didn't work your butt off, you lived in a place with no running water and sifted through garbage at a dump or something to survive. So I get why they're like that, but I'm thinking like, geez, do we want to raise every generation like this? Or is this like you made the sacrifice and you got them to the Bay Area, maybe take your foot off the gas for like a second and let them enjoy their life. I don't know. I mean, it's a hard decision to make, right? You can't tell people to not make their kids focus on academics, but it sounds like your research says, hey, this isn't going to work for everyone.

23:15if you make them all into calculus geniuses by third grade. Some of them are going to burn out and not do well and hate learning and hate school and not do it anymore. That's a big risk. And the research on this is, to me, even a skill like reading. If you look at a country like Finland, they deliberately have, in a lot of cases, illiterate kindergartners, which is counterintuitive. But if you think about it, the stuff that you can read at age five for the average kid is not interesting. Run spot run? Yeah. That's not going to get you interested in reading. So what they do is they wait till kids show interest or some obvious readiness, and then they welcome them in.

23:57And if you start a little bit later at six or seven, kids have a more sophisticated vocabulary. And then they can start reading more interesting books from the get-go. You don't have to see too many of these studies or too many examples in other countries before you start to think, we're doing something wrong in America. You know, I got held back in kindergarten, but then we had a split class and I could do all the reading from the split class, but I was terrible. Everything else I couldn't pay attention. My thing was not Jordan can't do the work. My thing was he finishes his work and then he talks loud and disrupts the class and he won't ever shut up and nothing we do is going to change that.

24:32So there was a preview of things to come. It was just it was just a foregone conclusion that I would be doing what I'm doing right now. Yeah. And I had the same loud voice. So like if 10 kids were talking, the teacher heard my voice and was like, Jordan, really? Again, you can't focus for five seconds. It was interesting, though. My mom was like, my son is smart. He can read better than anyone else in the class. And it's a split kindergarten, first grade class the second year that I was there. And he's the best reader in the class. To your point, it's true. I remember they were going through this book that was C spot run.

25:02There's the sun. The dog jumps over the rock or whatever those kinds of things. and they spent, you know, the first month reading that. And I read it before class one day and one go. And the teacher was like, I remember she goes, wow, you just, you can read that whole book. And then they were like, we need him in the first grade reading class, but he needs to be in the kindergarten thing forever. And they basically had to rearrange the class because it was just clear that I was not the dumbass that I was projected to be at that point. But it was because in part, yeah, I had a bigger vocabulary and reading was more interesting.

25:34So I could sort of skip all that. Because I know people are thinking, oh, well, they got to start somewhere. How do you start reading if you can't read C-Spot Run? You're not just going to pick up Harry Potter. That is kind of a valid pushback, I think, right? Yeah, I think it is. I think the idea is that you want to make the transition faster. And in order to do that, you need to know more words. Otherwise, it's going to take you a couple of years to get to Harry Potter, as opposed to maybe a couple of weeks or a couple of months.

26:01You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Adam Grant. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by 1-800-CONTACTS. You know that last pair of contacts panic? My wife Jen knows it way too well. She's had these mornings where she's out of contacts and stuck wearing these old glasses. She's got to keep wiping clean with her sleeve. But now she makes sure to load up ahead of time because her next set is always on the way from 1-800-CONTACTS. They're the only major retailer that lets you renew your prescription online. So Jen gets her same doctor-prescribed contacts fast with free shipping without leaving the house.

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27:39If you're wondering how I managed to book all these great authors, thinkers, creators every single week, it's because of my network. And I'm teaching you how to build your network for free over at sixminutenetworking.com. I know networking is a gross word. It's kind of cringy. This course is very easy. It's not cringy at all. It's very down to earth. It's not going to be awkward strategies that make you look bad or make other people feel bad. Just some practical stuff that'll make you a better connector, a better colleague, a better friend, a better peer. I teach this stuff all over the place, especially to government, law enforcement, intelligence agencies, things like that.

28:09It is very useful whether you're a student or you're retired or you're in the middle of your career. It takes a few minutes a day and many of the guests on the show already subscribe and contribute to the course. So hey, come join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. You can find the course, again, for free over at sixminutenetworking.com. Now, back to Adam Grant. This is probably outside the scope of this conversation, but how do you just get a kid to get that bigger vocabulary? Do you just have them talk a lot with other people? Is that how you do it? I don't know. Yeah, exposure to words turns out to be a factor.

28:40Daniel Willingham has a book on this where he says, look, we shouldn't underestimate the role of knowledge in learning. There's a lot of talk about teaching kids and adults how to think, but a precursor to being able to think well is having a lot of information at your fingertips and vocabulary is a basic building block of knowledge. So yeah, I guess exposure to words, being in conversation, I guess that seems to be a starting point, but I'm no expert, so what do I know? Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, I'm just going by it because again, yeah, I know I'm asking you stuff that's way outside the scope of the book, but it's interesting.

29:13People who go very far are less often freaks of nature and more often freaks of nurture. Again, very clever. I assume you made that up. Your publisher must have loved that one. You know what? I wanted it to be the title. The book was called Freaks of Nurture. Oh, that's a good title. Well, I thought it was too. And there were some of us who loved it and everyone else hated it and said, look, I don't aspire to be a freak. Oh. You should frame this as something that people actually want. And everybody wants to unlock their hidden potential. And that's where we landed. Hidden potential is a great title.

29:40And it's sort of more on brand with like your originals and your other stuff. Not that my opinion matters. The book has already been printed, so no one can change it anyway. But yeah. You know, there's always the paperback. That's true. And there are also the foreign translations. That's true. You never know. Yeah, that's true. If hidden potential doesn't translate, just change it into freaks of nurture, which definitely won't translate. Not a chance. That was another complaint about it. That's a good point. Because freak, it's like the word crazy. It could be something fun in English, but when you use it in another language, it's like deeply insulting.

30:10And it's like, oh, you don't want to run that. No, the wordplay on freak of nature is the only thing that makes it work. And if you don't have the phrase freak of nature in the language, it just all falls apart. Oh, right. You know, I hadn't thought of that. Good thing other people are on this. I would be terrible at this job. I know. My publisher, it was funny. Actually, US and UK both came back and said, love the book proposal, hate the title. No, you just killed my darling. But I'm going to use the phrase in the book. Yeah, there you go. And there it is. And look at you picking up on it. I mean, look, I didn't.

30:41And it's an audio book, too. It's not like this was in bold and underlined or a chapter heading. I mean, maybe it is, but I couldn't see that. So yeah, it does stick out well. It's very memorable. We talked about the effect of a great kindergarten teacher. It sort of makes me sad then that we're front-loading these teachers with all kinds of crap and making them do something that's kind of the opposite of what they should be doing, according to what it looks like your research is showing. You mentioned, you go further and say that character skills are actually more important than talent. Can you tell us what character skills actually are?

31:12Because it's, what does that mean? Yeah, so let's look at this in the context of West African entrepreneurs. I love this experiment. So you get 1 ,500 founders. They're randomly assigned to different experiences. So there's a pure control group. Nothing happens to them. And then there's a cognitive skills training group that basically gets taught the fundamentals of business. They spend a week learning marketing and finance and operations, accounting and sales. Two years later, that group is 11 % more profitable on average. So there's a benefit of learning the cognitive skills of business. There's another group, though, that's 30 % more profitable.

31:49And they've been randomly assigned not to learn cognitive skills, but character skills. The skills, if you want to break them down, in that particular experiment, we're looking at being proactive, disciplined, and determined. To be proactive, they practice anticipating market opportunities instead of just reacting to them and waiting for them to come. to be disciplined and determined. They think through the obstacles they might face and then how they might overcome them. And it's those skills that really affect your ability to learn. And I don't think most of us appreciate the importance of character skills.

32:18I think we think about character as a virtue. Right. Not realizing it actually requires knowledge. So Jordan, actually, let's think about this. Remember the marshmallow test of willpower? Yes, and I was wondering if that's real. I meant to ask you because it's one, now that we're in that hole like, hey, by the way, half the science that you read about in all these books is a bunch of BS. I'm wondering, what's the next sacred cow that's going to get slaughtered now? So is the marshmallow test real? If so, yes, cool, continue. Good news. The marshmallow test has been replicated recently. Great. So it turns out if you are offered one marshmallow as a preschooler and you can delay that gratification to wait 15 minutes for two marshmallows, you get better SAT scores and better grades a decade later, which is kind of neat.

33:02I always thought about that as just strength of will. Those kids have superhuman discipline. But if you go back and watch the videos or if you look at the more recent research, what you see is it's actually less willpower and more skill power. Some of the videos are hysterical. You'll see kids, they want to make the temptation less tempting. Yes. And so one of them actually sort of smushes the marshmallow into a ball and starts bouncing it, and now it's gross. Another hides the marshmallow and puts it out of sight. And that's a basic skill of character to say, I want to make sure that I don't fall victim to this gooey treat.

33:38And so I'm going to use a little bit of my knowledge to try to change the situation and make it easier for me. And that to me is character skills in action. My wife and I were really excited. As you know, the holidays are approaching and we had somebody from overseas send us these, you know, those Kinder eggs where there's like a toy inside. So it's that, but there's a stuffed animal that pops out of the top. that's the packaging. It's really enticing. So I showed those to everyone and I said, these are for Christmas. And my son goes, oh, I want it now. And I was like, well, you can, it's for Christmas.

34:07And he goes, where are you putting that? And I said, I got to put, I'll put it in my office. He goes, you should hide it because if I see that I'm going to want it. And I thought this is, that is really good self-awareness. My wife and I were like, look at him just knowing his weak point and being like, you better hide that. I mean, your son just aced the character skills test. Yeah. Right there. We were very stoked because of course, this is literally like the week I'm reading the book. And I'm like, I'm pretty sure that Adam Grant would approve of this answer, of this strategy of hiding. You got my stamp.

34:34Yeah, the stamp. How do we know that the character skills are more important than talent? Is there, did somebody measure this or is it just like, hey, they're both important? There are a couple of ways we could look at this. I think one would be, let's go to the research on kindergartners. So Raj Chetty and his colleagues, superstar team of economists. They look at data from a massive sample of kids in Tennessee. And what they see is that the kids who have more experienced kindergarten teachers, randomly assigned, actually go on to be more likely to graduate from college. And then they end up also earning more money in their 20s.

35:10Like, wait, your kindergarten teacher matters that much? What are they doing? Well, you can break that down and you can look at cognitive skills. And it turns out if you had a more experienced kindergarten teacher, you do get an edge in math and reading. So we want to know why. What are those experienced kindergarten teachers doing? One of the things you can measure is the cognitive skills they teach. Yes, the kids who have a more experienced kindergarten teacher do get an edge in math and reading. But that edge fades over time. The other kids catch up in first, second, third grade. They also get an edge in something else, which is character skills.

35:42They get rated as more disciplined, more determined, more proactive, also more pro-social in trying to help their classmates and make the learning experience better for everyone. and those character skills stick with them. The kids who had the experience, kindergarten teachers, are doing better on character skills as rated by their fourth grade teacher, again, by their eighth grade teacher. And then if you use those character skills to predict their income in their 20s, the character skills matter almost two and a half times as much as the cognitive skills. Wow. So what that tells us, I think, is that character skills may be more important than cognitive skills, especially if you combine that with the evidence on entrepreneurs.

36:17Same skills we teach in kindergarten and in midlife are more valuable than the ones that we think are for the task. The talent question, I think, there's another piece of data in the Chetty analysis, which is you can also look at their starting math and reading scores before they have the kindergarten teachers. And those are also less predictive than the character skills that they built. I don't think the character skills are more important than talent in every task or every field. I think what I would say is that in general, raw talent is probably a little bit overrated and character skills are underrated.

36:52That should be a relief for pretty much everybody, I suppose, because you can build, it's hard to just build, I mean, I don't know, I think the definition of talent is you don't build it, right, it's just there. Character skills can be, I assume they can be taught, right, correct me if I'm wrong, they can be taught and learned and developed and in fact, that's kind of the whole point. Yeah, I mean, if they couldn't be taught, there would be no effect of kindergarten teachers on character skills. There would be no effects with these West African entrepreneurs. I mean, just a week of practicing, like being proactive and disciplined and determined, and two years later, your profits go up by 30 % while the control group doesn't change at all and the cognitive skills group is getting barely a third of that benefit.

37:32I mean, that's staggering. It suggests that not only are these skills teachable and learnable, but we can learn them at any point in life and it may not take as long as we think. That's really good news. I love the idea of embracing discomfort. You mentioned this kind of when it came to language learning. This totally makes sense, right? When you immerse yourself in a language and you pick yourself up and you move to Japan, you learn Japanese better than you do if you're on Duolingo every day or whatever. And there's no refuge for you to get comfortable. Like if you want to eat, you got to figure out how to go and get that food and read the menu or talk to the waitress unless you're just pointing at pictures, which gets old fast.

38:08But it seems like school kind of destroys a lot of this because we're not necessarily, I mean, yes, maybe things are uncomfortable if you don't understand them, but that's not really what we're talking about here, right? Yeah, I was blown away by these polyglots that I met while I was researching this book. So Benny and Sarah Maria both struggled to learn languages in school. Benny thought he basically just didn't have the language gene. He tried Irish, he tried German, couldn't do it. Sarah Maria thought she missed the critical window. You know, her dad spoke fluent Spanish. Maybe if I had started learning it when I was a baby, then I would have it, but it's too late for me.

38:44And she could not, she could not get Spanish down. I think they're both great examples of hidden potential because they're now able to speak, I would say from talking to them and looking at how they were scored. Benny can converse in a dozen languages now. And Sarah Maria's got at least 10. It's insane. And they're both fluent in more than half a dozen. So how did they do it? Well, what they realize is that in school, they were able to take a bunch of language classes and a bunch of tests without ever really using the language. They weren't forced to speak it and communicate in it. And that means they didn't internalize it.

39:18Mostly the tests were written. And we all know that the only real way to learn a language is actually to talk out loud. So I think their advice is you got to become uncomfortable if you want to learn that skill. Because the whole reason people don't use a language is they think they need to master it before they say the words because they don't want to embarrass themselves. I don't want to sound like an idiot. I don't want to feel like an idiot. So I hold back. And when Benny finally overcame his hurdle, he actually set the goal of making 200 mistakes a day. Wow. He would move, literally pick up, leave for a foreign country.

39:50His goal was to get proficient in a language in two or three months. And he'd say, all right, I'm literally just going to memorize a sentence, introducing myself. And my hope is I make lots of mistakes because that will mean I'm making lots of attempts. And if I can accept that discomfort, I'm going to learn much faster, people are going to correct me. I'm going to get used to putting different words together and my competence is going to grow over time. And this is another one of those twists on like people say, use it or lose it. Maybe first we should say use it or you might never gain it in the first place.

40:22Doesn't quite have the same ring to it, but is equally. No, but more accurate. Yeah, more accurate. Yeah, exactly. Look, that jibes completely with my experience. I moved to Germany. I spent 10 months there. I went to a public high school. Now I still remember the words for like carbon and oxygen and stuff like that in German and I'm basically fluent in German. I've spent over 10 years learning Chinese one or two hours a week on Skype and using some like app-based flashcards and I'm conversational but I am not as fluent in Chinese as I am in German and it's like I've spent 10 plus years learning Chinese and 10 months learning German and my German is twice, three times.

41:00I don't even know how you can measure better than my Chinese. It's not even close. How much of that is because, are you doing Mandarin? Yeah. It's a harder language than German. It is harder. Do you think that's also a factor? That's a factor. Yeah, it's funny. I wasn't necessarily going to bring this up, but you're right. That's definitely a factor. I think if I had spent 10 years learning Russian, I would be much, much further ahead because the problem is a lot of it is voc. It's not like, oh, I don't understand the grammar. It's purely vocabulary learning. And that's very, very hard when you can't just read a word and you've got to memorize as a symbol because you're mapping symbols to words, which then you have to memorize the sound for that word.

41:36But if you can read it like Russian, you just have to learn Cyrillic alphabet, which I learned the Cyrillic alphabet in less than a week. And I can still write Cyrillic alphabet in cursive even though I learned it like my sophomore year of college. So that stuff, yeah, I think a large part of it is Mandarin is just way, way harder than most other languages for that reason. But to your point, I think it would be a different equation if you were able to put yourself in a situation where you were forced to use it. So in Benny's case, we've established he is not a natural language learner. He's not one of these people who just picks up a language without having to really concentrate.

42:12He got to proficiency in Mandarin, moving to China after five months. I could see that. I think if you were to add up the total time that he put in using the language, it may not be different from the time you put in in 10 years. Yeah. In fact, he might have even gotten more because I'm literally talking about a couple hours a week on a good week learning Chinese, and that's mostly conversational stuff. So yeah, there's a lot of that. I do wonder, I'm curious, I should ask him if he can read and write as well, because that also adds just like ridiculous amounts of work to the load. If you're just talking, it's amazing that he got fluent in five months in Mandarin from just talking.

42:46That's incredible in itself. I am curious if he can also read and write. It's just like it blows my mind. Well, it sounds like a future podcast. I think the thing that intrigues me about Benny and also Sarah Maria is they're kind of seen as professional language hackers. But I looked at them and thought, no, these people are actually professional learners. They can take something that's completely foreign. They can absorb it and become experts in it in a fraction of the time that most of us do. And it's because of their methods, not their talent. You're right. I know they probably have a bunch of things that's like, here's the best practice to learn this and here's the best practice to learn that.

43:20But I bet you that the number one thing at the top of the list with a bullet that supersedes everything else is go there and actually use it. All this other stuff on this list is like, we'll help you memorize other things or correct your mistakes faster. But if you're just not there speaking and listening, probably none of that other stuff matters as much at that point, if I had to guess. I think that's right. Sarah Maria, I was asking her, where should I start if I wanted to learn a new language? And she said, okay, one of the things you can do is - Expedia.com, yeah, book your flights. Yeah, go.

43:52But if you don't have that opportunity, She said, you know, other than memorizing a phrase and starting to introduce yourself to people, she said, you can spam your brain. So, you know, take your favorite show, let's say you're a big Friends fan, and watch it in the language you want to learn. I thought that was a great idea, and it's definitely something that could accelerate your progress, but it's not going to get you all the way there, as you were saying. The TV thing is quite useful for languages, but you kind of have to do it while you're there. Like, when I was learning Spanish in Mexico and I would come home and be tired, I'm like, I'm going to watch the Sony network, which had friends on it, to your point.

44:24and I'll look at the subtitles, which I think were, I can't remember if it had subtitles in Spanish or subtitles in English, and it was dubbed, but that was helpful, but it wasn't like, oh, you're at home in Toronto, you can just watch Spanish friends and learn Spanish. It's not quite the same thing. It's more like, that's how you relax, but still end up learning a little bit while you're in country. I know it's important to seek discomfort, though, not just embrace it when it hits you, and I think that there's a little distinction there that's quite important, because like you mentioned Benny was doing, he was going out and saying, I'm gonna make 200 mistakes, not just like, okay, when I go out to dinner tonight, I'm gonna try to order off the menu in Spanish or Esperanto or whatever.

45:04I guess there's no country that uses Esperanto in Chinese or whatever, and I'm gonna tolerate it. I mean, he was just like, how do I throw myself into as many uncomfortable situations, 200 per day as I can and get those reps in? There's a difference there in intensity that I think matters. I think so too. you, the research by Woolley and Fishbach shows that if you give people just the goal of learning, they actually don't learn as much as if you tell them, deliberately make yourself uncomfortable. You can see this with people learning to do improv comedy, for example. The ones who are assigned the goal of being uncomfortable actually end up improving more than the ones who are just told to improve.

45:39And I think that's because when you're focused on learning, you tend to take small incremental steps. Whereas when you're trying to be uncomfortable, you're going to challenge yourself a lot more. And that puts you in situations that have at least the potential to catapult you. So Jordan, I live this with public speaking. I'm an introvert. You know this. Yeah. I'm also, at least I used to be extremely shy. And I remember doing my first guest lectures and giving out feedback forums and students writing things like, you remind me of a Muppet. Oh, brutal. That's so hard to hear. I mean, and this was at Michigan where Midwest nice is a thing.

46:19Right, yeah. So I can only imagine what they were really thinking. There was another student who wrote that I was so nervous I was causing them to physically shake in their seats. Oh, that's brutal. Yeah, it was not fun. One of the things that got me through that was I didn't just dip my toe in the shallow end. I dove headfirst into the deep end. I think what a lot of people would do just to learn is to say, all right, I'm going to practice. I'll do a five-minute mini lecture. Maybe I'll gather a few people to give me pointers. I volunteer to give hour-long guest lectures in front of an audience of hundreds of students.

46:50I don't know what I was thinking. I don't know why my friends let me do it because I was terrible. But you do a bunch of those and you learn a lot more a lot faster by collecting all that input and practicing in a high-stakes environment. That, to me, was living proof of the seek discomfort. Don't just embrace it when it comes. I agree. A friend of mine is writing his first book and he's like, when I do my media tour, I need tips. And I said, start now before your book comes out and do all these little small podcasts that will have you and talk about the book you're writing. And you're not blowing those opportunities because the audiences are small, but you're still going to get interviewed and grilled.

47:25And you're going to have to think about the content. You're going to have to talk into the mic and not look up to the right and have your mouth off of target, or you're going to get the lighting right. And you're going to be so comfortable by the time you actually have to do a high stakes appearance. It'll be easy by then because you need to get those reps in. Not only that, but the content's going to be better too. Jordan, you're describing every author's dream of doing the book tour before the book is done. You want to hear everybody's reactions and questions, and then there's always a missing chapter that you should have written, and a point that you could have made much more clearly that you didn't think of until you got the, okay, well, what about this?

47:58Nine times. I mean, this is how James Clear did Atomic Habits. It was a series of tweets and blog posts that became a book. You're right. It probably is better to do something resembling the book tour before before you actually write the book, but also significantly harder to book media for a book that doesn't exist yet, I suppose. That's probably a thing. Yeah, that might be true. Yeah. You wrote not to ask for feedback, but ask for advice instead. I love this little practical hack tip, technique, whatever. Tell me about this, because I love the idea of asking for advice instead of feedback, but why is it important in the first place?

48:30It's an easy one. So a lot of us, when we want to get better, we know we need feedback. We ask people for feedback, and then we end up meeting cheerleaders and critics. The cheerleaders applaud our best self. The critics attack our worst self. And that can be demotivating and demoralizing. Actually, it's not that helpful to just be told all the things you did wrong yesterday. It's not always helpful either to be told all the things you did right yesterday. That can make you complacent. What you want are coaches who see your hidden potential and help you become a better version of yourself. And the easiest way to get people to become coaches is to stop asking for feedback and start asking for advice.

49:05if you say, what's one thing I can do better? People will give you pointers you can use tomorrow. They're more actionable. They're more concrete. They're more specific. They're less threatening. They're also less likely to just praise you and make you think you don't need to grow. This is something I learned actually during the public speaking journey when I asked people for feedback. Like they told me the things that sucked or they told me the things they liked. When I asked them for advice, I actually started getting things that I could use. I got, oh, you know, it'd be really great if you tailored this to our industry or to our region.

49:35I know you love evidence, and that's what you do for a living, but we also want to hear your personal experience. Your stories help to bring these ideas to life, so don't shy away from putting your own narrative in the conversation. And all of a sudden, my speaking changed because I was getting suggestions. And I think, I don't know that we should abandon feedback in all situations, but I think most of the time when we ask for feedback, we'd probably learn more if we asked for advice instead. That advice certainly sounds better than what was the other one? I hate you look like a Muppet or something I mean, that's not that's hardly actionable, especially if you actually look like a Muppet There's just nothing clearly I mean, Jordan They never even told me which Muppet so I don't know what to do with that No, that's the problem with it, right is it's like oh crap.

50:16There's a lot the spectrum is quite wide of which Muppet You can look like and none of those could be a compliment, but some are worse than others. That's for sure Yeah, yeah, man. Oh gosh, that's funny feedback, but probably not at the moment you read it I'm imagining at the moment you read it, it was less hilarious. I don't remember being amused at all. It was kind of devastating, actually. What am I supposed to do about that? Have I chosen the wrong career? Should I quit now? It's kind of the feeling. You wrote something else that really stuck with me, which is that people who are obsessed with their work, they put in, I should say, we put in longer hours, but generally don't perform any better than their peers.

50:56And that is kind of distressing, but also good news because it means we can maybe chill the hell out and still do well. Yeah. I mean, if you look at the evidence, effort has diminishing returns. I think anybody who's ever been married to a workaholic or had a roommate who was one has seen this. Hour 16 of work today is so much lower quality than, you know, hour seven or eight was that at some point, if you care at all about, you know, your ability to be creative or even just the energy that you're bringing to the table, you have to set a boundary there. And I think that this is probably common sense, but not common practice.

51:33Part of that is just American culture right now and startup culture and even creator culture. I mean, you read about these YouTubers that they quit and you go, why are you quitting? You're like one of the most famous people in the world on YouTube. And they go, I haven't been home for the holidays in seven years and I'm 25. Like I need to - It's insane. Take a week off. And I feel pressure to be putting content out every four minutes. Yeah, yeah. Like I'm doing a TikTok about ordering a salad at Sweet Greens because otherwise the algorithm is going to kick me down a notch. It's just we're sort of incentivized in all the wrong ways, either by the platforms that we use or by pure workaholism or by looking at somebody else who just did a TikTok and we're like, oh, man, I took a nap.

52:16I better make three TikToks now. Or I can try to be efficient and make a TikTok of my nap. Yeah, right. Exactly. Film this. Film this. If I do anything funny, cut it up. Yeah, the burnout is real. You mentioned bored out. Is burnout just you work too much and bored out is just there's no challenge left? What's the difference there? I think that's part of the puzzle from what I've read. I think the big problem when we look at burnout is you're overloaded. So you're overwhelmed, too much work, or it's too hard. Whereas with bored out, it's the opposite. You're understimulated. So as you said, there's not enough challenge or it's just, it's repetitive and monotonous to the point that it just sucks the life out of you.

52:55this is the jordan harbinger show with our guest adam grant we'll be right back if you like this episode of the show i invite you to do what other smart and considerate listeners do which is take a moment and support our amazing sponsors all the deals discount codes and ways to support the show are all in one place jordanharbinger.com slash deals that's a searchable page with every code and hey if you can't remember the name of a sponsor you can't find the code just email me Jordan at JordanHarbinger.com. I am more than happy to surface that for you. It is that important that you support those who support the show.

53:27Now for the rest of my conversation with Adam Grant. Tell me about perfectionism. Does that play a role in any of this? Because I think going back to sort of the creator example, a lot of these people, they'll tell me the amount of time they spent on a production of something. And I'm thinking that's good if you love it. But if you don't love it, that's way too much time to put into filming two guys having a conversation. Like, it looks great with the smoke in the background and the table and the lighting, but like, unless you really love the$25 ,000 video setup that you did, it's not worth it.

54:01It's just not. But these guys, and in fact, it's not just guys, but for some reason, it usually is. They're just beating themselves up every single time. And again, some of it's the platform, right? The views, if they get views or likes, it's good. and if they don't, then it's terrible, regardless of how good it actually is in their own mind. But it seems like this can really kneecap you. Yeah, I think I've lived this one personally as well. Well, actually, I thought I'd recovered from perfectionism. And then I wrote a whole chapter in the book on it. And I was writing the Hidden Potential quiz to give people a chance to assess their character skills and identify a strength in an area for growth.

54:37And like any self-respecting psychologist, I took my own quiz. and my biggest area for growth was perfectionism. So I failed the perfectionism test. And I guess that means I'm still in recovery, which is unfortunate. It is unfortunate. I mean, there are plus sides, right? It keeps you motivated, but also, and we did a whole episode on this with John Acuff years ago, episode 632. It's not fun when you're in that, right? It's like any other addiction. It's not healthy at the end of the day. This is what I experienced. It's also what I've read in the research. which Tom Curran has done meta-analyses, studies of studies, looking at what happens to perfectionists.

55:14And it turns out they burn out at higher rates because they're constantly ruminating and beating themselves up and putting unreasonable levels of pressure on themselves. I definitely was guilty of that. But the other mistakes we make, which I think you're foreshadowing here, perfectionists end up basically trying to optimize the things they can control. And that means that too often they're perfecting things that don't actually matter, these tiny details, and overlooking the big picture. So you've created the perfect video set, but you didn't put enough prep into the content or the guest. And in many cases, they also aren't taking risks.

55:49The goal of perfectionism is to eliminate every flaw and every defect. And that means whatever's worked for me in the past, I'm going to rinse and repeat that. I'm not going to experiment because that might fail and I don't want to feel like a failure. And that means I'm stunting my own growth. Yeah, that's a really good point. The idea that you are afraid to take risks slash grow because you might fail because of perfectionism, which is the opposite of how you get good at anything. It's the opposite of how you make a great show. I'm going to only do stuff that's worked for me in the past is not a good recipe for loving your career in 10 years from now.

56:26That's for sure. No, it doesn't create the trial and error that would allow you to innovate and ultimately discover maybe there's a better method. Maybe there's a better way. Early in my career, I only talked about dating and relationships. And then one day. I remember those days. You remember those days, right? Yeah. And lo and behold, you start to get sick of it, especially when you're married. Like it starts to get really weird. But before that, I was starting to burn out. And I remember a friend of mine was, he's like, oh, man, my friend, we got to go out for a beer. You got to hear this story.

56:55and it was like this guy who had smuggled drugs and he got caught and then he ended up having to almost go to prison and he was like an FBI informant and I was like, this is so good. Somebody should turn this into a podcast. Too bad my show's only about dating and relationships and it has no place there. And I just was like, you know what, screw it. So I did the episode and I was like, hey, in the beginning I said, hey, this has nothing to do with dating and relationships. It's just a crazy story from a friend of a friend. If you don't wanna hear it, then just skip to the next episode. and we got more feedback on that episode than I expected and probably more feedback on that episode than I'd gotten on any show previously and people were like, more of that, that's fascinating.

57:34This is before true crime was like a genre of podcast. This is just, wow, I never heard a criminal talk about crime before openly because it's audio so his face wasn't shown. He's like, I don't know, there's no repercussions from this. It's some weird niche podcast. So then I thought, oh, I can actually just have really interesting conversations instead and that's what my show will be And that blew this thing up like crazy because now I'm able to talk about what I'm interested in in all different fields. And I never would have discovered that if I was like, no, it's got to be perfect. Let's stick to dating and relationships because that's where I control the whole thing start to finish.

58:09And I know what I'm going to get at the other end. So interesting. It makes me think there are probably some things that you were curious about but that didn't resonate for your audience. and that's a learning opportunity as opposed to, oh, I brought that guest, that episode didn't do well, now I'm toast. Right, yeah. There was almost no danger of that, right? I was like, ah, I get one bomb if this bombs, especially if I warn people at the start, hey, this might be a stinker if you just want to hear about dating. And people are just like, oh, I'm sure some people did skip it. They're like, I don't care about some drug dealer.

58:42Who cares, next? But they weren't like unsubscribed because they were like, ah, he's going to go back to his normal thing next week. Like, so that was a big deal, a big learning. And I'm still, I still feel like I push the edges of stuff sometimes. And yeah, sometimes you get negative feedback, especially if it's about like Hamas and you do the wrong thing at the wrong time, you know, but that's, I think you do grow as a creator and you really do have to do that because man, burning out or getting bored out is a real danger that most people don't think of. They're like, oh, my hours aren't bad.

59:10I'm not burning out. But if you're doing the same damn thing, even if you only work five hours a day, that's just as bad. Yeah, there's also, I think there's an audience risk too. The audience can get bored out on the same topic over and over again. And I think that's why minimum you want different variations on your themes. But I think broadening your topics over time is one of the easiest ways to maintain their curiosity and also fuel your curiosity, which is last time I checked what podcasting is all about. People listen because they're curious. It's true. And I'm even talking about like the guy who's an IT administrator somewhere and is like, I'm not burned out.

59:44I can do all my work in three hours because I have all these automations set up. And unless we get like a DDoS hacker, whatever, I'm not going to work more than four days a week, three hours a day. But they're bored out of their mind because they don't have a challenge. Nothing is evolving. I'm not suggesting they break their IT network so that they can fix it or something. But I feel like we see letters in our Feedback Friday inbox that are about bored out that we just didn't have a term for it. Yeah, I think that's right. And so much of this is about then trying to bring novelty and variety into your routine.

1:00:18I had a chance to test this out recently. One of my most boring tasks is editing as a writer. I think anybody who writes even emails, right, is like, ah, it's more fun to figure out what you want to say than it is to refine the words because there's no more discovery in that. I feel like I'm a football team on the one yard line and it takes as much work at that point to get to the end zone as it did to march the 99 yards down the field. And I'm like, I'm getting nothing out of this, but I know it matters to the audience. I need to find a way to make it more motivating. So one of the things I decided to do recently was I just, I tried to write in different voices.

1:00:54One of my editing goals was, all right, I tend to be pretty cognitive, abstract. I need more emotion and vividness. I try to rewrite this paragraph in Maya Angelou's voice. It was such an interesting experiment because it sort of broke me free from the way that I'm used to writing and got me thinking about metaphors and, you know, some more evocative language than I would normally use. And let's be clear, what I wrote was embarrassingly awful, but it got me interested in editing again. And then I thought, OK, who are some fiction writers who are really good at those skills that are maybe a little bit closer to my style and voice?

1:01:28And so I tried a John Green paragraph and a Maggie Smith sentence. And that's for me a small example, but it really made a difference in terms of my level of engagement in a task that I normally avoid. That's a really interesting way. I'm trying to think how you can do that with podcasting without sounding really weird. Like, all right, I'm going to do the show. But instead of me being myself, I'm going to act like someone else. I mean, maybe it's a show you never air. I don't know. Well, I think what you could do is you could take a couple of podcasters that you really admire whose styles are different from yours and make a list of what are the questions they would ask this guest.

1:02:01I would imagine, I haven't tried this actually, I'm curious now, if you come up with 10 or 20 of those, one or two have to be worth trying. Sure. Yeah, like this is me being Guy Raz or something like that, or the, I'm drawing a blank on this very famous podcaster, but this American life. Ira Glass. Yeah, of course. Ira Glass. I don't know what's wrong with me today. And just write those questions and just think about it in his voice. And then, And yeah, you're gonna end up with those very different but possibly super creative ways of looking at the conversation. When I was younger, I guess I really did do this with stuff with like Larry King.

1:02:34I'm like, what would Larry King do? Aside from just show up totally unprepared. Sorry, Larry, but you know it's true. But even that was partly kinda, he really liked doing that. He would show up unprepared and he's like, I just let my curiosity guide me, which was revolutionary in 1960 or whenever he started. One thing he told me in a bathroom at SiriusXM in New York once is he goes, I bring my own personal life into the conversation. I bring the audience into me. And my friend was there and he's like, that was advice? And I was like, hey, that was brilliant in 1960, 1970 when radio guys were leaning over with their fedora and they were just basically talking about something and nobody even knew their name.

1:03:11They were just a disembodied voice. Larry King was one of the first guys to be like, hey, this is, it's me. I got my personality here. I got my kid over there. My wife's over here. I'm talking about something that happened this morning. that seems unrelated and now I got rapport with the guests. Like that was all new, pretty much. And that was genius at the time. So I can see why this would be helpful because you kind of stumble across some of those same things. Yeah, and in some ways it goes back to the point of maybe, you know, sometimes the curse of knowledge makes it really hard for the expert to teach you.

1:03:42But if there are ways you can emulate them, that's a step toward growth. You wrote something that I'm curious if this is science or just something that sounded clever in the book. You said, often the advice we give others is the advice we need ourselves. Is that actually something we can back up? Or is it just like, well, actually, that just sounded really good. And I tweeted it and people liked it a lot. Can I say both? Yeah, it could be both. It's both. Yeah, what led me to this realization was I was reading some research. This was Laura Kray's work and also Igor Grossman's. The basic finding is what's called Solomon's Paradox, which is a lot of people give better advice to others than they apply when making their own decisions.

1:04:24I think everybody's had that experience. Have you ever talked a friend through a tough decision? Like, wow, I'm actually pretty good at this. Yeah, of course, yeah. And I'm like, what I have to do with it. You're grappling with the same decision? I'm terrible, what's wrong with me? So the psychology of that is self-distancing is really powerful. When you look at your own problem or dilemma, you get stuck in the weeds and you end up with a spreadsheet of 19 different factors to consider on which job to take or which school to go to or where to move. And then you're trying to figure out how to weigh them all.

1:04:51When you give somebody else advice, you're further removed. And that makes it easier to zoom out and say, okay, there are really three priorities that you ought to consider here. And I would choose, let's rank order them. And I would choose the option that's best on the top one. And so I think if you apply that process, anytime you're struggling on a decision, if you find somebody else who's stuck on it and you give them advice, that will give you the perspective you need to handle your own dilemma. Yeah, I like that. I didn't even think about the idea that distancing yourself from the issue is kind of the key.

1:05:21That explains a lot that we do the Feedback Friday advice segments, and I'm always like, would I have thought of this if this were my own problem? The answer is almost always no. Nope. Because I'd be so pissed at the person, I would just do the dumbest thing possible and get myself in trouble. Or I would just be too busy venting to my wife about it to have come up with this elegant solution that seems almost obvious when I'm writing it for somebody else who's got the same issue. That's quite subtly genius in a way. I know we're running out of time, and I really want to get to some of these other points here because there's some genius stuff in here.

1:05:51Tell me what others having low expectations of someone does to that person. You have this way of flipping that around to becoming an advantage when you're doubted by somebody. Yeah, if you're doubted by the right people. So this is my colleague Samir Nurmohamed's research. What he shows is that if you're an underdog as opposed to a favorite. If the people who are doubting you are not credible, they don't know the task, or they don't know you, that can actually become fuel. And you say, who are you to question me? I'm going to prove you wrong. And Samir shows that if you can give people low expectations from observers who lack credibility, they will actually work harder in response to that.

1:06:30That's funny. And I think this is, we can't control naysayers. Kind of anybody who's on social media is going and have someone doubt them at some point. Sure. So what Samir shows is that you can actually harness those as motivation. That's also really good news because I will say being doubted by experts is so much more rare than being doubted by nobodies, especially, look, if we're looking at social media, I don't get people who I respect. You're not dropping into my DMs being like, by the way, your latest show, terrible. You should just give up, right? It's random people with like a cartoon character.

1:07:01Your best work is behind you, Jordan. Right. Like it's always random people with a cartoon character image, zero posts, zero followers and zero following or whatever. And it's like, hey, your show sucks. I heard an ad for it. It's the worst thing I've ever heard. And I'm like, okay, so that stuff is not in short supply. And it's pretty cool that you can use this to be motivational, but it's a little counterintuitive because if somebody's an absolute nobody and unqualified, why would that motivate me to work more? Like they don't really know anything. Why is that motivating? It seems like it shouldn't be.

1:07:29Oh, that's such a good question. I've never thought about this. I think you're right. I mean, intuitively, the moment you realize the person's not credible is the moment you should stop caring what they think. Like completely. Completely. I mean, it should be irrelevant. Right. If only we weren't wired to be such social creatures. Yeah, that's it. I think you could do some evolutionary hand-waving about how, you know, the fear of social exclusion is adaptive. Maybe that's a factor here. I think, though, that social disapproval hurts. And it hurts viscerally before you stop to think, like, does this person's view actually matter to me?

1:08:01Right. And I think that, you know, it's often hard once the emotion is activated to make it go away. And so it's easier than to channel it and say, all right, I'm going to show that person that they were wrong than it is just to ignore them once they've they've riled you up. That is, it's important to remember that, I suppose, because especially if you're doing the aforementioned taking risks and you're a creator and you're doing something, you're going to get the peanut gallery being like, I hated this. Stick to what you know, dumbass. I mean, that's just like garden variety appetizer for a creator who's doing something that is not their usual thing.

1:08:33So, yeah, that's a little superpower there that you can turn that into motivation. Imposter syndrome, we've done a lot on this. Episode 127, we did a whole article about it, but tell me why imposter syndrome is a sign of hidden potential. I never really thought about it that way. I hadn't either until I read Basima Tufik's research. She was one of our doctoral students and she showed that when you feel like an imposter, you often end up going above and beyond. And I looked at this and said, okay, this is interesting because imposter syndrome is the opposite of being an underdog. As an underdog, you feel like other people are actually underestimating you.

1:09:10As an imposter, you fear that they're overestimating you. Well, the reason that's a sign of hidden potential is you can't see all your strengths. We all know we have blind spots. We forget that some of those blind spots are actually bright spots. They're capacities for growth that are invisible to us. And if there are multiple people who have high expectations of you, it usually means they've recognized some kind of latent ability or motivation or room for improvement. that you just, for a variety of reasons, your biases, your lack of experience, you can't recognize yet. And I think this is really hard for people because we know more about our own histories and our own experiences than anybody else can.

1:09:48And so it feels like, well, if other people have high expectations of me, but I'm lacking confidence, I'm right, they must be wrong. What we forget though is that other people are more neutral, they're more independent, they're more objective. And if multiple people believe in you, you should probably believe them. That is lovely. You're right. Imposter syndrome, when you go to Harvard, everyone raises their hand and says they have it. If you give the talk at Apple, they make sure their boss isn't in the room, and then they raise their hand saying that they have it. And everyone in law school was like, I don't belong here.

1:10:21They're gonna figure out I'm a fraud. The only groups that I've talked to that don't have it are high school kids because they're all so concerned with looking cool that they would never admit that they had this even if they were being honest in the first place, right? so the idea that high performers tend to have it has always stuck with me but this is definitely why it's the reason high performers tend to have this is they are always sort of moving up faster than they feel safe doing because their manager's like Tom can handle it he's on top of Angela is the best person we have on this and Angela's like oh my god I've only been here for two years and they're giving me this project they're gonna fire me if I blow it and it's because everybody else sees that they can do it, but of course, except for them.

1:11:02That makes a hell of a lot of sense. Yeah. And I think this goes to the reversal of confidence and success that I think so many people overlook, which is a lot of people think I've got to build my confidence before I can take on a new challenge. And that is backward. In most cases, you're not going to magically wake up one morning and suddenly feel confident. You actually build the confidence through taking on the challenge. And so it's the leap that you don't feel ready to take yet, that as you take it, as you embrace that discomfort, you then say, okay, I am capable of doing this. And then your confidence can rise as a result of taking the risk.

1:11:39I think you're right. I think imposters end up doing that. They're like, well, I don't feel like I know what I'm doing yet, but what do I know? These other people who are credible, who are knowledgeable, they think I can do it. Let me give it a try and then we'll find out. Yeah. It's tough to surrender to that, right? Like, Well, maybe they're right that I am qualified. It usually only goes in the other direction. Maybe the person who has zero followers on Instagram and dropped into my DM, maybe that person's right. Not the person who's worked with me for five years on every project so far and has vouched for me, right?

1:12:06That guy, he doesn't know what he's talking about. That's a recipe for misery. Well, yeah, which we're all cooking up somewhere in the back of our heads. I know we have very little time left there. You give this astronaut example in the book, this guy who applied to be an astronaut a zillion times. I'll let people go get that in the book. but the point was he grew up, he was like a, he picked strawberries, is a migrant worker. It sounds like the message from this or one of the messages from this anecdote was that overcoming adversity is a major benefit or asset to some of these more elite positions.

1:12:35Is that an overstatement or is that really what you're saying here? Like somebody who really starts off far behind, they have so much more distance to travel. So it almost, it sort of flips its own head. It's the people who are starting with the worst conditions and have made it the furthest are actually maybe those with the biggest advantage at the end of the day. I don't know. Maybe I'm getting this wrong. I think that's a really interesting way to capture it. I think you're onto something there. I think that when we look at people, early failure followed by later success is a sign of character skills because it usually means that they face some kind of obstacle, a lack of opportunity or a lack of talent, some form of adversity.

1:13:14And then they were able to overcome that. And if you look at their trajectory, it shows a rise. And usually behind that rise is, you know, they had the proactivity, the pro-social tendency, the discipline, the determination to face adversity and then grow through it. Adam Grant, I know you got to run. Thank you very much for doing the show. Another one in the books. I'd ask you what you're working on next, but you're just going to lie to me and say, I'm not writing a book for a while, but I've already seen this movie. Okay. Wait a minute. I have to, I have to get you to rethink that Jordan. Okay.

1:13:43I'm not, not planning to write a book. I just don't know what it's about yet. But as soon as I figure out the topic, I am going to write it. And in the meantime, go blue. All right. You're about to hear a preview of the Jordan Harbinger show about the evolved strategies of human mating. So I'm an evolutionary psychologist and I'm very well known in my scientific communities. I talk to people about mating all the time and I learn something practically every day from people. So our predictions of what is going to make us happy are known to be off base. Sometimes people pay a lot of attention to the mate attraction process and not enough attention to the mate retention process.

1:14:24Men and women have overlapping mating psychologies, but in some domains, dramatically different mating psychologies. It's become fashionable to try to argue that men and women are really identical in their mating psychologies, in their sexual psychologies, but they're not. I think that's one of these kind of ideologically driven agendas. And we know scientifically that the areas in which they differ. You know, I think one of the myths is that somehow we're supposed to meet the one and only when we're at a very young age and live perfectly happily ever after for the next 50 years with no bumps in the road.

1:15:03And I think that's just naive. There's a new body of research that talks about the dark triad. And the The dark triad is also more likely to cheat. Dark triad is high narcissism, high Machiavellianism, and high psychopathy. People who are both men and women who are high in these dimensions are much more likely to cheat. You want to avoid those in a long-term mate for sure. Avoid emotional instability and avoid narcissism in potential mates. To learn more about what people want in a mate, successful tactics of mate attraction, and more with Dr. David Buss, check out episode 758 of the Jordan Harbinger Show.

1:15:43You know, Adam may actually have found something that liberals and conservatives can agree on. If somebody overcomes adversity and climbs a rough path, progressives love that we're celebrating their victory over adversity. If somebody puts in a ton of hard work at a level most people would never be able to sustain and essentially makes inborn talent or lack thereof the least important factor in their success, conservatives love this too. So I think we can all get behind this concept of hidden potential and measuring our success by how far we've come as opposed to where we began. So I really like this concept in part for that reason.

1:16:15I think it's really smart to look at things that way. It's a really interesting way to flip this stuff on its head. And hey, if you're one of those people who's come a long way and you didn't have all the advantages starting out, well, now you know that Adam and I and many other people are patting you on the back. It's really about how far you've come and not how you begin. As Adam writes in the book, we don't evaluate a diamond by how it looked at the start. We evaluate how it responds to heat and pressure. All things Adam Grant will be in the show notes at jordanharbinger.com. You can also ask the AI chatbot there on the website.

1:16:47Transcripts in the show notes, advertisers, deals, discount codes, ways to support the show, all at jordanharbinger.com slash deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show. Our newsletter is also up there. A lot of freebies in the newsletter coming soon. We dig into an old episode of the show, dissect the lessons and takeaways. The newsletter is a great place if you want to recap, you want to know what to listen to next, or you're just a fan of the show. JordanHarbinger.com slash news is where you can find it. Don't forget 6MinuteNetworking over at 6MinuteNetworking.com. I'm at JordanHarbinger on Twitter and Instagram.

1:17:18I also welcome all connections on LinkedIn. This show is created in association with Podcast One. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace, Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Millie Ocampo, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for the show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. The greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. If you know somebody who's interested in this kind of work, this kind of social psychology, this sort of thinking, Adam Grant in general, definitely share this episode with them.

1:17:46In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn. And we'll see you next time. This episode is sponsored in part by the Something You Should Know podcast. Finding a great new podcast can feel like searching for a needle in a haystack. Let me save you some hassle. Check out Something You Should Know with my friend Mike Carruthers. Every episode is packed with fascinating insights that you can actually use. Mike interviews top experts on topics that shape your life, like how to optimize your brain chemistry, the best and worst ways to apologize, probably could have used that recently, why couples hate to talk about money.

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