Conversation with Adam Grant — Honing Your Potential and Building Strong Character Traits

24:32And it's compelling when you hear about it. And I understand when they're talking about it. And then I'm like, this feels like it's, it almost feels sort of borderline unhealthy that we don't have self-determination. What are your thoughts about it? I have never understood the appeal of this argument. And I also want to know, if we don't have free will, then who forced Sam and Robert to make these arguments? Because clearly it wasn't their choice. I mean, look, I'm not a philosopher. I'm a psychologist. But I think there's a logical fallacy that leads people to reject free will. So if I understand Sapolsky's argument, he's basically saying, look, there are a lot of forces outside of your awareness and outside of your control that influence your decisions and your behaviors.

25:12That's true. That doesn't mean I don't still have choices about what I do and who I become. So most personality traits are about 40 % heritable. And, you know, we should not discount nature. You know, whether you're an extrovert or an introvert, whether you tend to be more agreeable like me or disagreeable like you. There's a biogenetic set of influences on that. And we can we can see it in your brain chemistry. But that leaves a lot unaccounted for by nature. And I think, you know, you can think about your upbringing and your, you know, your culture is shaping your choices. But at the end of the day, I don't think there's any reason to believe that we don't decide our own destiny within the set of constraints and affordances that we have in front of us.

26:00Yeah, that makes sense. That's well put. Talk about how alternating between different skills can lead to better performance. This was a complete surprise to me. It was one of my favorite things that I learned while I was writing Hidden Potential. I've always assumed that you should practice the same skill over and over until you get better at it. So back in my days as a springboard diver, I would do five or seven reps of the same dive and try to make little adjustments. And then hopefully I'm working toward mastery. And yet experiments show that you're better off doing what's called interleaving, which is, let's say, you know, you're trying to improve as a mathematician.

26:36and an artist. You should spend maybe 10 or 15 minutes working on your math skills and then switch over to painting and then switch back. And there's something about, one, the variety that's motivating. It keeps you from either burning yourself out or just experiencing what psychologists call bore out, which is literally being bored out of your mind. And then there's also, there's a processing benefit that when you switch regularly, there's deeper learning that comes from having to recall the skills and kind of pick them up fresh as opposed to just repeating them on autopilot. So I just want to press pause.

27:13You said you're a springboard diver. I forgot about that, but I remember hearing it once. So my last company, L2, we were very data driven and we used to rank people. And, you know, that's probably a hate crime now, but we used to evaluate people and sort of rank them relative to each other. I'm sure you're going to tell me that's the wrong way to do it. But anyways, we did it. And then we try and find correlations so we could improve our recruiting or be more inclined to hire certain people over others. And we came away with three things. And these things are all a little bit upsetting. The first was they went to an elite school.

27:46And nobody wants to believe that now. And everyone's saying, and there's a lot of research showing that people from non-elite schools, especially the top, have similar outcomes. But we found that people who went to great schools were generally the top performers. Two, that they had participated in sports and specifically a sport like diving or gymnastics kind of individual performance. It wasn't a romance sport, but required a lot of discipline. And then three, and we would never say this out loud, our top performers were women. And now there's a lot of data coming out showing that, especially when you're hiring young people, that women's prefrontal cortex just matures earlier.

28:24I'd love to know when you're going to tell me the dangers and the caveats of having that kind of bias, if you will, but also specifically the importance of competitive sports or other types of activities that can enhance performance as an adult. Fascinating. I have so many questions for you. How were you measuring performance at L2 when you did this ranking? We would do 360 reviews and we would look at how strong their performance was in the eyes of their colleagues, their peers, subjective judgment around how they were driving client satisfaction, their analytical skills, their communication skills, and whether they were a culture carrier, that they generally enhanced the culture.

29:07They made it a nicer environment to be around. We had sort of a balanced scorecard assessment. I'd be very curious to triangulate those scores with objective performance data, which is obviously sometimes hard to get. But I wonder, you know, when I think about the let's start with the elite schools, when I think about the elite school advantage, there could be obviously some bias in how people are judging candidates who are known to have a strong pedigree versus not. There's also, there's some work by Stern and Westphal that suggests that one of the sort of hidden advantages of, you know, generally coming from an upper class background that makes you more likely to get into a top school is you learn these sophisticated influence tactics that are sort of out of reach for people who didn't have a privileged background.

29:51So instead of complimenting people directly, you compliment them behind their backs and then it gets back to them. instead of, you know, selling your idea in a pretty assertive or maybe even aggressive way. You come and say, you know, I'd love I'd love your advice. What do you what do you think about this idea? How could I get it heard? And so I wonder if there's, you know, just there's some tacit knowledge that's not available to people who didn't come from an elite background. Yeah, I can. I mean, you just see the millions of ways that in a capitalist society, so much advantage accrues to people from our kids from wealthy households.

30:30I mean, stuff you never even think about. In the book, you point to the fact that students actually learn more when they have the same teacher for multiple years, which I thought was really interesting. And because when we, both of us are educators, how might K through 12 schools better format themselves so that students live up to their potential? And have you given any thought to in higher education, what might be some fixes or some improvements in terms of getting kids a greater ROI on the substantial investment they make in higher ed? There's so much that we need to rethink there. I think, well, first of all, the idea of having the same teacher multiple years, it's a small effect, but it's been demonstrated in North Carolina, Indiana, Tennessee, Chile.

31:12And what seems to happen is when kids have more extended relationships with teachers, teachers are better are suited to, you know, not just instruct, but actually mentor and coach. And they're much more effective at personalizing their instruction. Kids are also less likely to be absent. They have fewer disruptive issues. And then immediately everybody wants to know, well, what if my kid gets like Professor Snape? And, you know, interestingly in the data, staying with the same teacher for multiple years is more effective if the teacher is poor or if the students are struggling. And so I wouldn't necessarily count this out as something that's only relevant if you have a great teacher, because teachers can grow with their students over time.

31:54But I think that's one small practice that's not expensive. It's fairly easy to implement. It also gives teachers variety, so they don't have to teach the same material every single year. What else can we do? I think the evidence is pretty clear and consistent that play-based education is powerful, particularly early on. So I'm a big fan of the Finnish practice of giving kids 15 minutes of recess for every 45 minutes of instruction. We've kind of done the opposite in the US where kindergarten has become more and more like first grade. You're spending less time on dinosaurs and space and the things that help kids love to learn.

32:29And instead doing much more sitting at your desk, drilling how to write sentences and how to do addition. And I think that's a mistake because Empirically, the kids who get the best grades and ultimately show the most growth later on are the ones who have intrinsic motivation to learn. And I don't know if a better way to cultivate intrinsic motivation to learn than to make school playful early on. Yeah. And a lot of people I respect say at the end of the day, the best thing you can do for young kids is just to get them to play. Walk us through the Peter principle. Oh, yeah. So this is a classic idea in sociology that you basically get promoted to your level of incompetence.

33:11The basic thought is that every time you succeed at a job, you move up. And then at some point, you're not good at your job anymore. So you can't get promoted and you get stuck there. Should we be rethinking this? I find there's a hierarchy and they've gotten a little bit better. People talk about individual contributors, but there's this general gestalt, I think, in corporate America that if you don't keep elevating by traditional titles, you have failed. And to me, it squanders human capital and creates unnecessary shame. What are your thoughts? I'm disappointed to be agreeing with you on that, Scott.

33:46It's a bad sign. It's a red flag. It's a problem. But no, I mean, look, I think the evidence is pretty clear on this one. You can see it in research by economists on salespeople, where the salespeople who are the best revenue generators are more likely to get promoted, and they're actually worse at management. Yeah, they're taken out of sales. Yeah. Yeah. So why would you want to put them in a position where they're not using their most effective skills? It turns out the best managers are not the people who are the biggest brain makers in those individual contributor jobs. They're the people who are the most collaborative.

34:18in helping their colleagues sell. And so I've become a fan of dual promotion tracks to say you could stay individual salesperson or engineer or pick whatever your role is, and we're gonna give you a bigger title and we're gonna give you a raise, but we're not gonna require you to manage people if you wanna move up because you may not have the skill or the will to do that effectively. Something I struggle with, and you talk about it in the book, is how to deal with imposter syndrome. What can people do to mitigate that feeling? You still feel like an imposter? Oh, Adam, I'm, I'm a hundred, not a hundred percent.

34:52I'm 90 % confident people are going to figure out that I'm not that talented and not that good and not that quality of person. And my whole world's going to come crashing down. I constantly have that fear. Really? Oh yeah. I had no idea. Yeah. Well, it's because you haven't invested in our relationship, Adam. I need you to spend more time with me. No, I have huge imposter syndrome. Anyways, what, what can people do to mitigate that? Well, first thing is the research by Basima Tufik on it is very powerful. She asked the question, why do we have to turn it into a syndrome? Yes, there are people who walk around feeling like I'm an actual fraud and it's only a matter of minutes until everyone finds out.

35:33But most people are not like that. Most of us, we have these temporary moments of doubt, wondering, am I up to this challenge? Am I qualified for this role? Are other people overestimating me? Am I as good as they think I am? And what Basima shows, she studied how often people had those thoughts among military cadets, medical professionals, investment professionals. She found no consistent costs of having more frequent imposter thoughts. She actually found benefits that people tended to work longer knowing they had something to prove. And they tended to listen better knowing they had something to learn.

36:09Is that your experience? I find it's a feature, not a bug that I want. I want to live up to people's image of me. It's very motivating. People think I'm really good and people think I'm a good person. And that inspires me to try and foot to that. Well, you've already answered your own question. Now, I should say it's I think it's probably easier to do that as a white guy. A hundred percent. The world generally expects you to rise to those actually those those standards. But yeah, I think, you know, Basima's advice is exactly what you've just said. It's it's to say, hey, if I feel like an imposter, that means other people think I'm pretty great.

36:41And now I go, I need to go and earn that. I would go further. I think imposter syndrome is actually a sign of hidden potential because other people have a more neutral and more objective view of you than you do of yourself. And odds are, if they have high expectations of you, they have seen some capacity in you to grow that you haven't recognized yet. Mm hmm. You recently tweeted, I am who I am is not a sign of a strong identity. It's a mark of a closed mind. A rigid sense of self is a barrier to growth and makes you a prisoner of your past. Say more about what makes one have a strong sense of self.

37:20That's an interesting question. Well, a mistake I see a lot of people make is they anchor their identities on their opinions and beliefs. And that stops you from evolving what you think and also how you think. So I think a strong sense of self is not, you know, basically, I am what I think is true. It's I am what I think is important. In other words, I think if you're going to have a strong identity, it should be grounded in your values. not your beliefs. So maybe an easy example of this would be if you're a doctor, if you decide that your identity is around doing, well, let's go back a half a century or so.

38:05You know, I'm a professional lobotomist. And that's what I believe is helpful to people. You're going to have a really hard time accepting the evidence that removing part of people's brain is not actually helping them resolve the disorder that you're trying to treat. Whereas if you anchor your identity on a value of, you know, protecting people's health and trying to promote their well-being, then as soon as the evidence shifts, you can change your mind with it. And so, you know, I would not want to go to the doctor who has an identity around particular treatments. I want to go to the doctor who has an identity around following the evidence around particular treatments.

38:44We'll be right back.

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40:40What types of personalities do you think are missing from leadership roles? What characteristics or attributes do we over-index on when we're trying to pick a leader versus those we under-index on? All right. So if you skipped a chapter eight of Hidden Potential, there is some disconcerting evidence that we tend to promote narcissists consistently because we mistake their confidence for competence. We also overinvest in extroverts because it's called the babble effect. The person who talks the most is the most likely to seem leader-like, dominant, confident, assertive, even though that person isn't at all more qualified or more capable.

41:22So I think we should stop elevating the people who take up the most space. And we should start looking at people who have the character to elevate everyone else around them. So I guess my big test of leadership is not, is this the smartest person in the room, but rather, do they make the room smarter? And that really comes back to character strengths and skills. I want to promote people who are givers rather than takers. I think often we call that servant leadership. I want to promote people who bring humility, not narcissism, to the table, so that instead of denying their weaknesses and silencing their critics, they actually work to overcome their weaknesses.

42:01and embrace their critics as an opportunity to learn. And I think if we started there, generosity and humility, we would go a long way. Really curious to get your thoughts on it. And there's no easy to segue here, but as an organizational psychologist, I'm just so I'm curious what you think about the organizations in higher ed that are coming under enormous strain and stress based on what's happening in Israel and Gaza. And Penn has come under a huge attack for not being more forceful, for the leadership not being more forceful in renouncing or speaking up against terrorism. I'm just very curious what your thoughts on are in terms of universities as an organization, and is this highlighting an issue with the organization?

42:48Is this a healthy process? What are your thoughts about what's going on on college campuses right now? First of all, I would not want one of those jobs. Oh, my gosh. Can you imagine? I cannot imagine. So I guess I want to start as somebody who studies organizations and leaders, but doesn't have a position of responsibility like that. Let's just appreciate how challenging it is and how many different stakeholders are pressuring you to, you know, to favor their politics. You know, that said, I don't think it should be hard to see the difference between free speech and hate speech. And I think we should have swift responses and strong action against that.

43:30So, you know, that to me is kind of table stakes. I think the, I guess one of the tricky things here is that, you know, we're seeing a lot of different voices call on leaders to make statements. And I think for the most part, the statements are the empty, they're empty words. What I want to see are policies that are going to be enacted and enforced consistently. And so, you know, as sure, it's nice to have an email. It's, you know, sort of, I guess, a little bit of useful virtue signaling to see a social media post. But at the end of the day, what I think that leaders need to be doing is to say, look, here are the different circumstances that could arise that would require us to take extreme action to prevent marginalized groups, groups that are, you know, under threat from being physically or psychologically unsafe.

44:23on our campus. And here's what violations look like, and here's what we're going to do about it. And I don't think those policies have been clearly spelled out. I think that's really powerful, Adam. And I love what you just said. There's a difference between free speech and hate speech. And I was so rattled. It's funny, as you get older, I don't know about you, but I was a younger man. I was just sleepwalking through life. This kind of thing didn't really weigh on me very much. And now I find it's really rattling, for lack of better term, triggering whatever the right term would be. And when I see students at our most prestigious universities chanting what is just clearly hate speech, I believe that we should use, I don't know, whatever technology to identify them and then kick them out of school.

45:11I agree with you. I don't want to see any social media posts. I don't care about a letter to alumni that attempts to please everybody and pleases nobody. But I do think, and we are lacking there, I think it's time for someone to come out and say, hate speech is unacceptable and we're going to kick you out of school. You are here. It is an honor for you to be here. And there are lines, no shoes, no service. And one of those things is hate speech. Anyway, a bit of a speech on my end. What are your thoughts? Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of leaders have been taken aback, not realizing that it should not be, no one should need to say that this is unacceptable.

45:53We shouldn't need to have a policy about this. It's, I mean, how could it not be more obvious? And so I think that's probably caught some off guard. Yeah. So, Will, that is obviously a very heavy topic that requires more conversation. What, you're sort of, you're kind of, I don't want to call you, you're not even rounding third base. You're still a young man, you're rounding second base. Do you set goals for yourself in the next five or 10 years? Is it just reach and influence? Is it more bestselling books? Do you write down specific objectives? If someone said, all right, you're going to wake up and it's five years or 10 years from now, what do you hope to achieve that you haven't achieved already?

46:35Well, those are terrible goals. Reach, influence, bestselling books. Why? If you're doing important work, your work helps people. It's the important work that matters. Okay. Yeah, but you don't want to be a tree falling in the forest. You need to get it out there. Of course. But I think those are really poor proxies for impact. So let's take a book, for example. We can both name some authors, and I'm not going to name them, who sold a lot of books that were read by very few people. That's a failure, in my opinion. I love that. Sold a lot of books, but were read by very few people. In other words, they got caught up in what was supposed to be a hot book and they bought it and they didn't get past the first chapter because it wasn't very well written.

47:15Yeah, exactly. And I think the opposite is, you know, is actually a success. You write something that really moves even a small group of people, whether it helps them live a better life or, you know, enriches their thinking in a meaningful way or enables them to solve a problem in the world. I don't care about the reach there. What I care about is the depth of impact. And funnily enough, Scott, when I was actually first starting as an organizational psychologist, one of the early questions I was curious about is, what matters for people's motivation? Is it the scope of impact or is it the depth of impact?

47:51And in the data I collected, depth just swamped scope. So it didn't matter how many people you reached. What mattered was how much did you touch each person who was affected by your work? So for me, what that means is when I sit down to think about next project for, you know, five-year horizon, I want to ask what's an interesting and important problem that I can take on that I can bring novel evidence and a fresh thesis to? Adam, do you have kids? Yeah, we have three. How old? They are 15, 12, and 10. what uh so you're you're kind of in the salad days for the golden years except for the 15 year old is a 15 year old a boy or a girl girl um i can't speak to that i have a 16 year old boy and i've gone from his hero to the anti-hero in about six months so what how has your work impacted your role as a father or the other way around i try not to take too much work home uh i feel like I never wanted to be one of those psychologists who screws up our kids.

48:54So I don't know that it's had a huge impact. I think, you know, I certainly read more developmental psychology and more parenting research than I probably would if I were in a different field. And I hope some of that's been useful. I think one of the things I've, I guess I've learned from that, you know, I'm a complete consumer in this area, not a producer at all. But one of the things I've learned from the research is kids, at the end of the day, they need to feel that they matter. That's one of the most important forces for mental health. And you've talked to Scott a lot about the crisis that boys are facing right now.

49:28I think in many ways it's a crisis of mattering. So when most parents think about mattering, they think about making sure that their kids are unconditionally loved and that they get their attention. But what we forget is that in order to matter, you also need to feel that other people rely on you, that you make a difference. And so one of the ways that I've tried to make that a reality in our house is when I struggle with something, I don't hide it. I don't just tell our kids about it. I ask for their advice on how to handle my challenges. and what I'm trying to do is one right you know recognize that we can all learn something from everybody we meet including our own children they they know things that we don't they see things about us that we can't sometimes they're the best mirrors to help us recognize our blind spots but two I want to show them that they have the competence to solve adult challenges even as kids and the hope is that builds their confidence over time and I don't I don't think it would have ever occurred to me to do that if I weren't geeking out on psychology research in my spare time.

50:35Any thoughts on being a good partner? I have many thoughts on being a good partner. Where do you want to go with that? Well, our listenership is mostly young men in their kind of late 20s, early 30s. A lot of them recently married or trying to find a mate, just, you know, kind of getting into their childbearing years, if you were, their role their role as a partner and a father. So advice to your younger self on how to be a good partner. So I think one of the challenges that a lot of people run into is in a committed relationship, you sort of end up just nagging each other constantly to do things.

51:14And nobody likes it. And it's extremely frustrating. And at some point, my wife, Allison, and I sat down and said, you know, we need a weekly meeting. Yeah, you heard me right. This is not just something you need with your boss. I think it's something you need with your partner. And in that weekly meeting, we would sit down and talk about, you know, okay, here are the things I need you to do this week. Let's check it on, you know, on all the tasks that are slipping through the cracks. And it was a dedicated time where we each were able to express, hey, this is something that It might sound trivial to you, but it's actually really important to me.

51:53Like, I don't want the garbage can sitting out for three days. It's embarrassing and it's gross. And then, you know, instead of feeling like that's an interruption in the course of the week and it's sort of a nuisance in the relationship, it becomes a chance to sit down and really think about, well, what can I do this week that my partner would really appreciate? So I've become a big fan of marriage meetings, and I was pleasantly surprised to discover there's some research suggesting that when you do these kinds of check-ins about what can we do to support each other better, it actually improves the health of a relationship.

52:28Adam Grant is an organizational psychologist at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and a best-selling author who explores the science of motivation, generosity, rethinking, and potential. He has been recognized as one of the world's 10 most influential management thinkers and has received Distinguished Scientific Achievement Awards from the American Psychological Association and the National Science Foundation. His latest book, Hidden Potential, The Science of Achieving Greater Things, is out now. I'm jealous of you, Adam. I find that you continue to just do incredible work, and you're smart at getting it out there.

53:01And I, you know, my jealousy is there's some things about it I don't like, but it mostly comes from a good place, and that is I admire what a positive impact you are having on the world. So keep on keeping on, brother. That's very kind of you, Scott. Well, I try not to do too much envy and jealousy, but we're all human. No, go on. Jesus Christ. Come on. No, but what I want to do is say I admire several things about you. One is I love the fact that you're just fearless when it comes to challenging people and being a little bit contrarian. I also really appreciate the fact that despite having, I think, a healthy ego, you're not afraid to be wrong and to admit you're wrong.

53:43And I think that is something that needs to be modeled dramatically more than it currently is. And finally, you managed to be interesting and funny on a whole range of topics, which is not an easy task at all. So those are all things that I look up to. And yeah, maybe sometimes I envy them, but more often, I guess when I feel envy, I look at that and say, well okay that means I want what you have so instead of you know feeling like damn Scott Galloway I hate that guy you're like okay he's a role model for certain things that I want to work toward that's and that that gives me more to like than dislike I think I like it Adam well listen I look forward to seeing you on the road and stay well same to you thanks for bringing me

54:41Algebra of happiness, masculinity. So let's try and break down three basic legs of the masculinity stool. And I've been thinking a lot about this, and this might be the wrong stool, but right now it's my stool. It's protector, provider, and procreator. And I'm going to talk a little bit about procreator. What Dr. Atia said that struck me was kind of how his advice to young men would be to be a dad. And that is what it is to be a procreator is that ultimately you become a provider and you become responsible for the well-being of someone else. And that's what it means to be a dad, is that you put their interests ahead of yours.

55:17And this has a lot of wonderful benefits. First off, a lot of downsides. If you don't find the right partner, your life's going to be full of stress. It is very difficult to manage the demands and the logistics and the cost of kids without a really competent partner. But assuming you can find a competent partner, and part of that is being, I hate to use the word aggressive because it sounds unkind, but aggressive, putting yourself in social situations, introducing yourself to someone you might have a romantic or sexual interest in, texting someone maybe. You don't hear back from them and your ego's like, that's it, I'm not texting her again.

55:51Well, okay, give it a couple weeks and text again. Who knows what's going on with her? following up, being kind, trying to do thoughtful things, trying to, quite frankly, trying to romance a woman, holding her hand, taking that uncomfortable risk of initiating physical contact. This is what it means to be a procreator. And then when you have kids, ensuring that you're raising kids that are going to be more secure, loving than you. That's at the end of the day, that is the fundamental box we have to check as fathers. And that is where I've brought some more forgiveness to my father. My dad, you know, wasn't an especially good father to me.

56:30But then I think about, well, okay, he was much better to me than his father was to him, which means he's checked the key box and what it means to be a procreator. The means to the ends, the means, economic security, money, having some influence, being good at something, that's all a means. The ends is, in my view, having a group of people who love you, but more importantly, you can love immensely. And you will never love anything as immensely as kids. And the way I describe it is Anne Rice used to write these novels about vampires, and vampires could never climax. They could never orgasm. So they were kind of sexaholics because they never got to a point of satisfaction.

57:13And I feel a little bit about my life pre-kids that way. And that is no matter how much money I had. I always wanted more. I was never really satisfied. And the only time I've ever felt sated, the only time I've ever felt, okay, this is it, this is enough, is on rare occasions when I'm with my boys. And I'll be at a soccer match, and they go crazy after a goal, or they're arguing with each other, which I find kind of funny most of the time, or they just instinctively jump on the couch and throw their legs over mine, and we have our dogs there, and my kids seem happy and secure and healthy. It's the only time.

57:49It's the only time on this planet where I felt, okay, I get it. I get it. This is enough. This episode was produced by Caroline Chagrin. Jennifer Sanchez is our associate producer and Drew Burrows is our technical director. Thank you for listening to the Prop G pod from the Vox Media Podcast Network. We will catch you on Saturday for No Mercy, No Malice, as read by George Hahn, and on Monday with our weekly market show.

58:23Oh my gosh. Oh my goodness. Now that's great coffee. I'm sorry. Go ahead. Thanks to Smartsheet for their support. What would you do if you had more time in the day, even just one hour more? In reality, we actually all do have more time than we think, but that extra time is sucked up by distraction. Jumping from window to window and application to application to get a simple task done creates endless pockets for distractions to slip in. That's why Smartsheet lets your team manage all your workflows in one seamless platform, so you can clear the clutter and find that elusive extra time every single day.

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