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Ronaldo is an individual Superstar but the way he plays his game does not Elevate the team so what can we learn
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from this first of all Adam Grant business psychologist one of the world's most influential career and business
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thinkers he will help you do the best work of your life and reach your professional potential my job is to
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study how to make work not suck and help you become a better version of yourself so what is some of the myths and
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findings about unlocking our hidden potential these might surprise people it turns out that that perfectionism is not
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all it's cracked up to be it's a risk factor for Burnout firstborns score higher on IQ tests but later borns tend
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to be more willing to take risks we don't procrastinate for the reasons we think we do it's not hard work that you're avoiding when you procrastinate
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it is Decades of research on brainstorming has shown that if you get a group of people together to generate ideas if instead you'd let them work
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alone you would have gotten more ideas and also better ideas when people talk about imposter syndrome that feeling is
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actually pretty rare what's much more common is imposter thoughts but there all kinds of benefits of having those
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thoughts for example data from 50,000 people found that Chrome or Firefox users are on average better performers
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and they stick around longer than if you're using Safari or Internet Explorer give me one more okay well this is the
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most vital skill to unlock the hidden potential of yourself so what you have to do is before we wrap I have a couple
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questions for you I feel why do I feel nervous you should feel nervous course uh first question is what's something I
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can do better as a podcast guest oh
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gosh quick one this is really really fascinating to me on the back end of our
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YouTube channel it says that 69.9% of you that watch this channel frequently over the lifetime of this
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the Subscribe button thank you you so much and I will repay that gesture by making sure that everything we do here
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gets better and better and better and better that is a promise I'm willing to make you do we have a [Music]
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deal Adam at the very essence of your work
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what is it you are trying to do teach or give people I want to give people the
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most useful insights from social science to help them think more clearly and critically and make choices that will
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build happiness and meaning and success and if you if you think about your career over the last couple of decades
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what points of inspiration have you pulled from to give you as an idea of your sort of academic and and experience
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profile that has poured into all of this work all of these books that sit in front of me now so I'm an organizational
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psychologist by training uh that means my job is to study how to make work not suck sometimes is a tall order uh but
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I'm interested in uh how we find meaning and motivation how we can lead more generous and creative and curious lives
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we were talking earlier about the books that you've written this particular book in front of me here Originals one of my
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team members Grace Miller she went around our office and gave a copy of this book to everybody and she wrote a
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personalized note inside when you use this word Originals you yourself are an
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original in many respects I I had a a read through your earliest years and it was quite clear to me that you
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were different in several ways throwing that question back at you you know I've
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got this photo here actually it's my team printed off for [Laughter]
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me yeah I was seven years old and I was
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obsessed with Nintendo and I I think there must have been a Saturday where
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was uh I must have played for seven or eight hours straight and then I got really frustrated when I didn't beat the
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game and my mom said like these video games are just like turning my happy kid
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into a gremlin and I'm worried that they're frying his brain and she called the
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local newspaper and said you should do a story about how video games are hurting kids and they said you're right and we
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want to profile your child so here I am uh with a lot of hair no teeth uh just
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hooked on a video game and uh you know what's funny about this is uh if you
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read the research on the effects of video games it turns out that most of the benefits outweigh the costs uh that
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kids who play video games even a few hours a day end up with more self-control better working memory uh
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more grit and self-discipline uh because they're constantly having to face and overcome challenges and build their
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resilience and um they're even some possible mental health benefits so video games were not the devil as my mom
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thought it's funny cuz when I was reading about those early years where you seem to be quite
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obsessive when faced with a variety of different challenges it did feel like you're someone that's committed their
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life to trying to beat the game first by understanding the game and then understanding the levers you need to
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pull to to beat the game is that like an accurate assessment that's fascinating I
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never thought about it that way I think that that's been a huge part of my motivation but I think at some point I
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got dissatisfied with the idea of beating the game and I wanted to try to make the game better interesting I think
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maybe to take a specific example um I remember so I I had I had a moment in
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gosh it was 2011 uh I found out I got tenure and tenure uh so you know essentially a job
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for life at at my University and the question is now what
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you can keep just doing research and teaching classes and a group of students sat me
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down and said you should write a book because you know you should make your knowledge accessible to people who
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aren't in your class and I felt like I didn't have anything to say and I I I
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was passionate about teaching other people's ideas and they said no your research has influenced us and we want you to make that more widely
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available and I think at some point it hit me that what they were asking me to do was to
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try to redefine the game um that at the time I think the the lesson I was trying to teach them was you do not have to be
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a selfish taker to succeed um and actually I'd done a bunch of research showing that people who were givers who
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were happy to help others with no strings attached uh in the long run actually outperformed expectations and
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my student said to me look what you've taught us is um we don't have to you know kind of take a me first uh
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competitive attitude all the time uh achieve a lot of success and then start giving back we can be sharing our
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knowledge we can be making introductions uh to try to help people connect and expand their networks we can be giving
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others feedback um and solving problems for them and that can actually contribute to Our Success you got to get
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that message out there and so um you know making the case that it might be better to be a giver than a taker was my
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first attempt to to change the the the way we Define the game and and really the way we think about the rules of
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success and that's kind of been my mission uh as an author um ever since to
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ask what are we getting wrong in the way that we try to play the game and how do we shift it I want to talk about that
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and I I'm a Manchester United fan and I was thinking I've been debating my friends in our Manchester United chat
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for the last two years about Christiano Ronaldo and we have two contingents in the group and this is to your point
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about giving and taking we have the one contingent who think that he was tremendously beneficial to Manchester
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United and really any team that he touches and then you have me who believes that on balance when you
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look at the M this the stats he actually has a net negative impact on the team
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because he takes more than he gives and then in reading your book you use the
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word Ronaldo so I feel like this is a wonderful opportunity to ask you about that and what your thoughts are on those
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kinds of sort of self self-centered individuals in in teams yeah it's it's
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such a fascinating Dynamic so I'm not a Ronaldo expert but the way the way that
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he carries himself and the way he plays his game does not scream give her to me
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um and I think the best evidence I've seen that speaks to this is a study of NBA basketball teams uh so there are
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obviously some differences uh between basketball and football but I think one of the commonality is you have high
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inner dependence where the team really depends on every player to play a critical role and what you see in the
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NBA data is that if teams have um more selfish takers on the team more
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narcissists uh they actually fail to improve over the course of the Season you end up having a ball hog uh who
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doesn't Elevate the team and that's especially true if the biggest star or somebody in the core role is very
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self-centered and so I think based on that evidence there's a case to be made that Ronaldo is is basically you know
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he's an individual Superstar but he's not making other people better and I think the most meaningful way to succeed
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is to help other people succeed I think a true leader I think Messi is more like this is somebody who asks how can I make
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everybody around me more effective I'm going to have to say I agree and do you yeah I do agree and I I spent some time
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looking at the numbers and I I credit the athletic as well for doing a piece called the Ronaldo effect where they looked at every team he had joined I
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since since he was at Real Madrid and every single team um according to the data and I'm kind of paraphrasing here
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I'll put a link in the description below to the article I'm referring to had fallen in performance when he joined
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post His Real Madrid days which means he went from Juventus and all these all these clubs and they've all got gotten
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worse he's actually gone out now to um play in the Middle East and that club was top of the league when he joined
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they're now second in the league and they they had a six-point lead when when he joined so I think it it speaks to
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something about this idea of giving and taking for for optimal team performance but Ronaldo in many respects is an
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original it's hard to argue with that you know what I mean I mean look some of the things he can do um on you know on a
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field you just wouldn't expect a human being to be able to pull it off uh so there there's definitely extraordinary
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skill and I think improvisational creativity there but yeah we can ask some questions about is that ultimately
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in service of the team what is when you wrote this book and called it Originals what did you mean by an original how do
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you define that I think about Originals is people who don't just question the way we've always done it but actually
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take the initiative to create a better way uh so it's not just about having a new idea it's about taking action to
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create change and I think that's so important because I think it's it's often said that that ideation without
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execution is just hallucination there's so many people who dream up interesting ideas but never do
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anything about them and actually I I'll give you a personal example uh when I was uh when I was in university I had a
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roommate uh this is um 2000 um who had an idea for a social
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network and he said what if what if we could build like an online yearbook where everybody had access to each
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other's profiles and they could communicate and they could plan parties and he stayed up all night coding it and
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actually building the the basics of the platform and then he never followed through and never did anything with it
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and you know then what a few years later Mark Zuckerberg starts Facebook in the house next door and I could look at that
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and say my roommate was an idiot like why didn't he do anything about it but guess what I missed that same
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opportunity uh 1999 uh I co-founded uh what was called uh
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the first online social network uh on our campus and it was an egroup of we
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had connected about an eighth of our entering uh College freshman class before uh before we got to campus and we
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were all exchanging messages and connecting and then we got to campus and we shut it down because we said we all
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live in the same town now why do we need an online community and so I made the same mistake I was part of a group of
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people that had a very original idea and we did not execute it so the difference is execution there I think it's the
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biggest difference and what does it take for someone to be an
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executioner uh I hope no one becomes an executioner but maybe an ex an Executor would work um I think I think the it's
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not what I thought I think um I assumed that you had to be somebody who was always the first mover uh that you know
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if you didn't act on The Social Network idea in those first few years it was going to be too too late but as I think
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you know you know this already Stephen but uh I was surprised to find that some of the best originals are actually
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procrastinators that they don't rush in uh they wait for they wait for their best idea as opposed to just immediately
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implementing their first idea and of course they're testing and iterating and experimenting along the way um but I uh
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well let's let's go back to my Nintendo days here I felt like I'm I'm not an original thinker for a long time and one
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day I had a a PhD student G Shin who came to my office and said you know I
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actually think that procrastinating can make you more creative and G is incredibly creative and I didn't believe
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her I was like no this can't be true and she said really I have my most creative ideas when I'm procrastinating and I
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didn't believe it because I guess I've I've always been what psychologist call a precrastinator uh which which is
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somebody who the moment you have an idea you want to immediately put it into practice and so I you know I was always
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excited to get things done early and I was I was proud of being a good finisher and G said you know I actually think
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that's a mistake and I challenged her to test it and so she went out and and studied people in various jobs and had
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them actually fill out a survey on how often they procrastinate and then their supervisors rated their creativity and then we ran some
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experiments together where we tempted people to procrastinate by um putting different numbers of of funny YouTube
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videos available while they were supposed to be doing creative tasks and then uh we got their their creativity scored by experts and lo and behold it
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turned out that people who procrastinate a little bit are more creative than people who procrastinate like me what's
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your conclusion as to why well we we had a few hunches at first that that we tested uh well the first thing I wanted
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to know is what happened to the people who always procrastinated and G was like
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I don't know they never filled out my survey yeah no they they did eventually fill out the survey and they were they
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were also less creative so both extremes were bad if you never procrastinate if you always procrastinate you are less
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creative than if you sometimes do or if you do a little and what we found is uh there a couple of mechanisms at play um
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one is that procrastination can lead you to incubate ideas uh in the back of your mind uh so uh you have time to connect
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the dots see patterns you didn't see before another is that you end up getting some distance from the problem
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and that allows you to reframe it uh and look at it from a broader perspective and so what was interesting in the data
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though was that procrastin only boosted creativity if you were intrinsically motivated by the problem so if you were
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putting it off because you were bored or you didn't care then it didn't stay active in the back of your mind but if
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you were if you were putting it off because you were stuck and you hadn't figured it out yet or you were being patient and you kind of you wanted to
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have 10 or 12 more ideas before you decided which one to pursue then you actually got a creative boost so
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interesting and i' really relate to it because do you yeah 100% relate are you a moderate procrastin yes
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100% 100% I think this is important to say because I think sometimes people think that I get a lot of messages from
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people saying um Steve I'm procrastinating so much how do you not procrastinate and I always look at that and say I'm not the guy to tell you how
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to do that because procrastination in my mind is a bit of a tool um as you said there's different types of
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procrastination that I notice myself doing one of them is when I get stuck on
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something and I find myself picking up my phone as if I'm a manp possessed I literally what I'll do is I'll be in the
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middle of work and then the next thing I'm on Instagram and I'm like how did that happen oh yeah because the part in
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this piece of work you got to is um psychologically difficult for some reason I don't feel prepared or whatever
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and then the other thing I notice myself procrastinating on is just when I'm thinking through something I'll end up
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just walking around the house I'll end up cleaning doing the dishes or whatever and then coming back to the piece of work later um but I I would say that I'm
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definitely a procrastinator that's so interesting and I think think let's be clear I'm not encouraging people to
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procrastinate more that's that's not the goal here the goal is just to normalize procrastination and say it's a natural
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part of the creative process everybody does it sometimes and even though you expect it to be counterproductive um in
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certain situations it can actually lead you to better ideas and I think there's a maybe a myth worth busting here uh
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research led by fuchia Sur has shown that uh we don't procrastinate for the reasons we think we do so a lot of
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people think I'm being lazy I'm avoiding effort um what's wrong with me why don't I want to work hard but it turns out
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it's not hard work that you're avoiding when you procrastinate it's negative emotions unpleasant feelings you are
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avoiding a set of tasks that makes you feel frustrated confused bored anxious
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um a lot of procrastination is driven by fear I don't know if I can do this I'm not sure if I'm up to the challenge and
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so I put it off and I I think one of the best ways to to manage that is to ask what are the tasks that you consistently
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procrastinate on what negative emotions are they stirring up and then how do you change
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those what you procrastinate on I procrastinate a lot on editing actually and revising I love rough drafting it's
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very it feels very creative for me um it's fun to figure out what is the best evidence say how do I tell the story
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that brings the evidence to life and then the process of you know tinkering to get each sentence just right it bores
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me and so I put it off and I had to figure out how do I make that more interesting in order to to stop
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procrastinating altogether on it and how did you do that well one of the one of the things I did was uh one of my goals
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uh in in my recent writing was to to try to get less abstract and more concrete MH and so what I started doing was I
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started rewriting paragraphs in the voices of my favorite fiction authors which was such a fun experiment so how
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would Stephen King write this paragraph uh how would Maggie Smith an amazing poet how would she write these
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sentences and um and that that made it a creative exercise again as I was doing my research ahead of this conversation
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um I was watching your Ted Talk and one of the things that really stood out to me in your Ted Talk was where you start
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talking about internet browsers I immediately checked which browser I was using and I was using
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Google Chrome there go but you make the case that people who you can tell someone's I guess creativity I'm paraph
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I'm putting words in your mouth here by which in internet browser they use and there was a really important message in
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there for me so can you tell tell me about that um exactly what the findings can tell us yeah I was I was sitting at
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a a conference that it helped to organize and this researcher Michael hman is giving a presentation he's got
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data from 50,000 people and he he knows um they're filling out a survey and then
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he's tracking their job performance huge range of jobs and he knows um what web browser they're on uh it's one of the
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automatically collected data points and he's like I wonder I wonder if if there's anything there and he finds that
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he can predict your job per performance and also your likelihood of staying in your job from which web browser you're
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using this was so weird and he he stood up and he said I I don't know what's going on here but it turns out that
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Chrome and Firefox users are on average better performers and they stick around longer than if you're using Safari or
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Internet Explorer and immediately I I had a hunch
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um I'd been studying initiative and proactivity and being an original thinker and what hit me was Internet
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Explorer and Safari are the defaults they came pre-installed on your phone or your
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computer in order to get Chrome or Firefox you had to question the default and say huh I wonder if there's a better
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browser and take a little bit of initiative and so I start I start you know proposing this and people are like
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great so if I download a better browser I'm going to be better at my CH no no it's not it's not about the browser it's
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about the resourcefulness to say you want to be the kind of person who questions the default and asks if
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there's a better way and I think what happens is um in in people's jobs I've gone on to study this with with some
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colleagues the kind of person who upgrades their browser is also kind the kind of person who asks is there a more
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creative way to do my job um can I reinvent the way that we work together
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uh and that ultimately not only makes you better at your job it also helps you create a job that you want to stay in it
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makes sense and so on ongoing BAS is I'm only going to hire people who have
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Mozilla Firefox or Chrome installed on their browser it should be an interview question I don't know if I would go that
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far you said it so I'm do I think it's it's a fun question to say okay how did you like let's let's not limit it to the
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browser but talk to me about uh how you've challenged the status quo in the past yeah that's a good really good
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question um when we think about Originals who are the sort of landmark Originals of our
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time in your mind mind uh what domain do we want to talk about are we talking Tech and business
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Tech and business let's go for that I mean it's hard not to put Elon Musk on that list uh you can love him or hate
00:22:09
him but uh when it comes to you know dreaming up the vision and also taking
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the initiative then to try to make us a you know a multiplanetary spa species with SpaceX uh and build reusable
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Rockets which you know NASA had never really thought to do you know moving us into an all El electric car future um
00:22:28
yeah I think there are a lot of things to complain about with elon's leadership and decision- making and the way he communicates on the platform formerly
00:22:34
known as Twitter but uh I think he's an original no doubt about it how does he fit your profile of an
00:22:40
original I think I think he fits first and foremost because he challenges the status quo uh would be the beginning and
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then secondly I think he's uh he's Relentless in trying to make his vision a reality which is uh I think I think
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something that's that's driving some of his former fans crazy right now some people might say well he you know he was
00:23:01
like a child prodigy or he was a child genius so that's why he's so so great do you agree with that statement or do you
00:23:08
dispute it I I think it's hard to say in his case I think you know my my job as a social scientist is to ask what is the
00:23:13
evidence tell us about child prodigies and it turns out we overestimate them in a lot of cases because um once you're
00:23:20
you know once something comes naturally to you you often have a hard time um thinking about it in original ways so uh
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you know you see kids for example who can play a a Mozart Sonata at age four
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and they they drill over and over again and they're amazingly fast Learners and practice does make perfect but it
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doesn't make new they don't learn how to write their own original scores they don't get experienced with failure with
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trial and error and so they don't take enough risks to figure out how do I invent something that's never existed
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before um that's you know that's not true in every case but it it is empirically true that most child prod
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IES do not become known as adult Geniuses and I think that's in part because they don't learn to stretch their creative muscles because they're
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they're overwhelmingly talented so they don't need to put in the hard graph that others do and they don't need to fight
00:24:10
for new information in the same way that others do in some cases they get rewarded over and over again for
00:24:16
basically just mastering the way everyone else has always done it and so they don't they don't learn to break
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free from the mold these adult geniuses then what is it that they have that child prodigies don't well a lot of it
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is um is what what I've come to think of is character skills um which is a set of
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uh of capabilities to put your principles into practice so there are often people with hidden potential uh
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they um they may not be Naturals at first uh they could be you know underdogs or late bloomers or slow
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learners but they are um obsessive about making themselves uncomfortable saying
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if I only played in my strengths then I'm never stretching myself and I'm not taking Beyond enough new challenges
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there's a bunch of research to suggest they're like sponges uh they're soaking up lots of information and then trying to filter what's helpful out uh in and
00:25:08
then kind of rule out what's harmful and they are um they what I've come to think of as
00:25:13
imperfectionist which is they're um they're they're really careful and disciplined about saying uh when is it
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important to aim for the best and when is it okay to look for good enough perfectionism is um a topic people talk
00:25:27
about lot and I think everybody it seems to me that everybody wants to be considered a perfectionist as if being a
00:25:32
perfectionist is better cuz it what does that say about my my values it means that I really care about things being great it therefore means by way of that
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that I think I'm I produce great things and saying you're a perfectionist is almost like saying I make great work um
00:25:46
but you're saying that being there are some there are often times where it's better to be an imperfectionist that the
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Judgment of knowing when something is good enough yeah I I think you're under something here here so you know when
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when when you have to answer that annoying job interview question what's your greatest weakness it's everyone's favorite answer I'm too much of a
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perfectionist uh it's like Michael Scott from the American office like I have
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weaknesses as a leader I work too hard and I care too much and yeah people do
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think that perfectionism is you know ultimately more of an asset than a liability and that's why they they try
00:26:21
to get away with that in the weakness question but the evidence tells a really different story uh research led by Tom C
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and here in the UK shows that perfectionism is not all it's cracked up to be uh it's a risk factor for
00:26:34
Burnout it also if you look at the the best evidence available perfectionists do get better grades in school but they
00:26:41
don't actually perform any better in their jobs why I think the jury is still
00:26:46
out but my hunch based on the the evidence that's been gathered so far is
00:26:52
that perfectionists uh are good at school because they know exactly what's going to be on the test and so they can
00:26:58
cram and memorize until they they're prepared to Ace the material the real
00:27:03
world is much more ambiguous uh you don't know exactly what's going to show up in your performance review uh it's
00:27:09
not entirely clear what work is going to be valued and perfectionists are terrified of failure uh they don't want
00:27:15
any flaws they don't want any defects they want to avoid every mistake and so they don't take enough risks they focus
00:27:22
very narrowly on the things they know they can excel at and they don't end up growing and evolving and improving
00:27:27
enough I wondered if urgency has a relationship with this as well because in order to be successful in the real
00:27:34
world you have to be somewhat urgent which means sometimes you have to say that's good enough let's go let's move let's move and I I guess a perfectionist
00:27:40
would if left to their own devices would try and slow time down so that they could focus more on this this thing
00:27:47
right now they'd probably never ship that social network they'd probably still be in their bedroom in in America
00:27:53
somewhere working on it whereas Zuckerberg made a thing that was good enough and shipped it
00:27:58
then learn from that and the iterative process of making something better is probably more conducive with success
00:28:03
than just you know the Lean Startup talks about this a lot like get it out there and learn from it versus just
00:28:09
incubating it forever yeah this is this is I think a key Eric Reese point and it's been backed up by a bunch of ironically experiments showing that
00:28:16
Founders who experiment more end up being more successful uh because they're able to Pivot faster when something doesn't work and they they get lots of
00:28:23
of Market feedback um and signals on what's going to be successful and what isn't and you I know you've you've lived
00:28:28
that but you know it's it's interesting that you point this out because this this is a lesson I learned firsthand um
00:28:34
during my days as a an attempted athlete so after being too short for basketball
00:28:41
and too slow for for football uh I stumbled onto springboard diving and I I
00:28:48
by the way I I had no business being a springboard diver I was afraid of heights uh and also my teammates nicknamed me Frankenstein because I was
00:28:55
so stiff but I really loved it and I wanted to get better at it and I was a perfectionist and I thought that was
00:29:01
going to help me because in diving you're supposed to get perfect tense well guess what uh I have my most
00:29:08
basic dive a front dive Pike just jump up touch your toes go in head first I wanted to work on perfecting that all
00:29:14
practice and I was working on these tiny little adjustments that would take me from a six and a half to a seven and not
00:29:22
ever learning harder Dives and failing to raise my degree of difficulty and that really stunted my grow with as a
00:29:27
diver until one day my coach Eric best pulled me aside and he said you know
00:29:32
Adam there's no such thing as a perfect 10 and I was like wait have the Olympic
00:29:38
announcers been lying to me when they say a dive was done for perfect tense what what what's going on here and he
00:29:43
said if you look at the rule book a 10 is for excellence there's no such thing as a perfect dive and that really shifted my
00:29:50
perspective and what we did then was we said look I'm never going to get a 10 on any dive what we have to do is to
00:29:56
calibrate what's a realistic goal for each dive so for you know front dive we started aiming for sevens and I would
00:30:03
want to do 30 of them in practice and when I did my third one and Eric said that was a seven it's time to move on
00:30:10
when I was learning a much more complicated uh front two and a half with a full twist you do two flips uh 360
00:30:15
turn and then a dive uh the first goal was we want to do this for twos we we
00:30:20
just want to make it and then I got a little better at it and we started aiming for fours and fives on it and
00:30:26
Steve I have to tell you this has been one of the most useful lessons I've learned in my career is when I start a
00:30:33
project uh whether it's a book or you know a podcast season or I'm writing an
00:30:38
oped uh the first thing I do is I ask what is my target score here and for a
00:30:43
book it's a nine because I'm going to pour two years of my work life into this and you know I hope a lot of people will
00:30:49
read it and it's going to be useful to them so it really matters to do it about as well as I can when I'm writing a a
00:30:55
post for Instagram I'm pretty content with a six and a half just above getting
00:31:00
canceled is is my target there but that that calibration is helpful because I could spend all day crafting that
00:31:07
Instagram post and then I'll never get anything done do when you're thinking about what's good enough through that
00:31:13
framework is part of the equation the return on time spent because I'm
00:31:19
thinking about the Instagram quote like if you have a 10 out of 10 Instagram quote what's the return on that versus a
00:31:26
10 out of 10 book which can completely as we've seen change someone's entire life like a 10 out of 10 Ted Talk you
00:31:33
have a phenomenal Ted Talk I think it's got tens of millions of views and that can change your entire life in a way that any Instagram quote I've had some
00:31:39
banging Instagram quotes I got I had a couple of viral ones and what ends up happening as everyone just copies what you said and just posts it and you never
00:31:46
it never really does anything for you but a 10 out of 10 Ted talk like you've got or 10 out of 10 books like you know
00:31:51
exceptional books can change your whole life so maybe part of the equation is to think about the potential reward from
00:31:57
the investment I I think that's such a powerful way to frame it well let me let me react to a couple things first of all
00:32:02
I don't take tens uh so you're you're being overly generous here uh and I always want to know what can I do to get a little bit closer to 10 but I think I
00:32:11
think the thinking about the return on effort is really valuable and I think about that Less in terms of like what's
00:32:17
the immediate reward for me and More in terms of how can I have the greatest impact for the investment of my time and
00:32:23
I think you're right um you know like Instagram is a it's a quick hit of dopamine and it feels really great when
00:32:28
you get a lot of likes and you know enthusiastic comments on a post and then it fades really fast and like I don't
00:32:35
know I mean people when I first became an author people said you know well the pen is mightier than the The Sword and
00:32:41
you know of course ideas like you have to be in that world I don't know if the pen is actually mightier than than the
00:32:47
sword I do know that the ink lasts and that you know people ask questions about a book that I wrote a decade ago nobody
00:32:55
asked me about my social media post from several years ago and um I think podcasting actually lives somewhere in
00:33:00
between M right we like when we talk um sometimes idea stick actually there's
00:33:06
some evidence that audio is is more memorable um and more intimate uh than what you pick up on the page uh but I
00:33:13
think it's a little more fleeting like I I don't I don't remember a conversation I listened to from a few years ago the
00:33:18
same way I remember a book that changed my world view and so I I put a little bit more into writing than I do into
00:33:25
talking so interesting I want to talk to you as well about something you mentioned earlier which was this idea of
00:33:30
doing difficult things you mentioned it in passing and the question that was stored in my brain is what is it that
00:33:36
makes a certain type of person choose and lean into difficulty and and a
00:33:42
certain type of person lean out of it because that appears to be one of the key sort of correlating factors with
00:33:47
success in life your ability to choose discomfort yeah yeah I I think this is
00:33:54
this is such a vital skill and I want to I want to be really clear to say it's a skill right it's not just a personality
00:33:59
trait uh yeah you know some people are born with a little extra maybe you could
00:34:04
say reserve of willpower or they have the discipline or or the grit or the resilience um and it comes naturally to
00:34:11
them but this is very much a learn scale and I think the the the clearest demonstration of this for me is in the
00:34:17
the marshmallow test which has been wildly misunderstood in the last few years so you're you're familiar probably
00:34:23
with the classic demonstration that Walter Michelle did uh with his colleagues where you take um you take four-year-olds uh
00:34:29
you put a marshmallow in front of them and you say you can have one now but if you're willing to wait until I come back
00:34:36
then you can have two and then the original finding is that if uh the longer you can delay gratification if a
00:34:42
kid can wait 10 or 15 minutes for the extra marshmallow uh the better they score on a standardized test like the
00:34:48
SAT uh a decade later the better grades they get in School uh there there are all kinds of benefits of of this delay
00:34:55
gratification scill well in Psychology recently there's been a controversy about whether it replicates and uh some
00:35:02
of the replications um have shown that uh if you have lower socioeconomic
00:35:07
status you struggle at the marshmallow test it's really disappointing but it's
00:35:13
not at all surprising and in fact that was um that was part of the original research is if you grew up in a world of
00:35:18
scarcity um and I know you can relate to this from from your own lived experience um you could not afford to wait for the
00:35:25
second marshmallow it might never come you didn't know if you could trust the research team to come and and bring you
00:35:30
one and so you didn't have the chance to practice that skill and learn the habit
00:35:36
but what's really interesting is if you watch kids who who crush the marshmallow test it's more skill power than
00:35:41
willpower what they have are simple strategies that actually make the Temptation less tempting so you see one
00:35:48
kid will actually um sit on uh he sits on his hands so that he he's it's a
00:35:54
little slower for him to reach out to the marshmallow um another covers her eyes so she doesn't have to look at it
00:36:00
and then there's one kid who actually smooshes it into a ball and starts bouncing it so like you don't want to eat that anymore and this is this is why
00:36:07
I say it's a set of skills um not just a matter of will because if you have techniques for making discomfort less
00:36:13
uncomfortable and you know how to get I guess I guess if you know how to get comfortable being uncomfortable uh then
00:36:19
you are willing to to go into many situations where you're a little bit out of your depth and say yeah this might be
00:36:26
awkward this might be embarrassing but I'm going to learn something and I guess you know for me that was that was public
00:36:31
speaking like we were you touched on giving Ted Talks earlier I would have never dreamed of of standing in a red
00:36:38
circle I had no business whatsoever giving a TED Talk um I'm an introvert I'm extremely shy I was terrified of
00:36:45
public speaking and in one of my first lectures a student wrote in feedback afterward that I was so nervous I was
00:36:51
causing them to physically shake in their seats and the only way for me to get over that was to put myself continually
00:36:58
in that situation uh and get used to the discomfort is that really the key here cuz I I I'm thinking as you're speaking
00:37:05
about the people who I look up to like even like a David Goggins who just seem to be able to hold themselves into in
00:37:12
discomfort more than anybody else I mean friend of mine called Russ is running the entire length of Africa at the
00:37:18
moment um from the bottom to the top of Africa he's running it he's doing like two marathons a day you know most days
00:37:24
and I'm thinking are these people just like super humans that were born with this switch in their brain that I have
00:37:30
to I can only turn on if I have some kind of traumatic incident or is it is does the evidence support the fact that
00:37:36
this is a learned skill I think everything that matters in life is always a complex interaction of Nature
00:37:41
and nurture but I think we underestimate the power of nurture in these situations so Goggins is a great example I mean
00:37:48
he's he's a machine uh was he always that way no his whole story is about uh
00:37:53
you know feeling like he was he was vulnerable and wanting to become somebody where no one could hurt him
00:37:59
right and I think when psychologists study that uh my favorite theory is probably called the theory of learned
00:38:05
industriousness which is a mouthful but what what what is devout is the idea that if you reward effort if
00:38:13
you reward hard work if you reward seeking out discomfort then over time being in uncomfortable situations starts
00:38:20
to take on secondary reward properties in other words you get a little bit of pavlovian conditioning where when you've
00:38:26
pushed yourself a little bit past where you're comfortable that feels good and you're used to that leading to to
00:38:32
something positive uh and that can become sort of a self reinforcing cycle
00:38:37
I was thinking as you saying that about the role trauma plays in people becoming successful and if we if we take on this
00:38:45
idea that those that push themselves forward and then get rewarded for it are more likely to repeat that behavior the
00:38:52
question should probably become who are the people that got the greatest reward from pushing themselves out of their
00:38:57
zone of comfort in my mind for you to want to push yourself
00:39:03
out of a situation The Situation's probably not great and I was thinking about Goggins there what what he had to
00:39:10
do and many people that I saw on this podcast and speak to it appears to be the case a lot lot of time that there was something traumatic or difficult
00:39:17
going on in their home life with their parents maybe that forced them or pushed them to pursue something out of their
00:39:24
zone of comfort it actually often for pushes them off the the road um most
00:39:30
frequently traveled and they become like an original because they went through the shrubs and the prickly bushes yeah
00:39:37
is there evidence to support that it is helpful in becoming an original so it's
00:39:42
complicated because I think in a lot of the examples we look at there's a surv a survivorship bias we see the people who
00:39:48
manag to overcome adversity we don't see all the people who are broken by it mhm and so we always have to pause and ask
00:39:54
uh is this is this causal or is it just revealing that certain people who happen to face adversity uh
00:40:02
and were able to take something out of that you know we're we're growing from that I do think what what we know is
00:40:07
that resilience is underestimated uh as a general rule uh so uh if you look at
00:40:13
for example um rates of post-traumatic stress disorder they are lower when people go through trauma than people's
00:40:20
reports of post-traumatic growth saying look I I wouldn't wish this on myself or anyone else it was a terrible experience
00:40:27
but I had to grow from it and it made me better or stronger in some way uh that's more common uh than being you know
00:40:33
completely paralyzed um or Shattered by traumatic experiences I think the other thing we know is that um resilience is
00:40:40
not in an an individual skill um it's not a muscle you work on just by yourself it requires a support system
00:40:48
which I think of as scaffolding um a temporary structure that helps you scale a height you couldn't reach on your own
00:40:55
and I think a lot of what that looks like is having a parent a mentor a coach who
00:41:02
believes in your potential um and not only you know helps you find the motivation but then gives you the tools
00:41:08
uh to to bounce forward from the the hardship you faced when we talking about this point of nurture is I am the
00:41:15
youngest of four kids and in your work you discuss how that can be
00:41:20
consequential in my relationship with risk and um convention and all of those
00:41:25
things what does the data say about siblings and their and how the order in which
00:41:32
they're born can determine their character skills okay we need a
00:41:37
giant disclaimer on this the science of birth order is a mess uh it's full of
00:41:43
conflicting findings uh a lot of the world's leading experts don't agree on the patterns and what I'm going to tell
00:41:49
you is I think there are two patterns that have very consistent evidence across large samples and rigorous
00:41:55
studies but they are tiny effects tiny so they don't say anything about you and
00:42:00
your future possibilities um their patterns across very very big samples so
00:42:06
let me let me start with the bad news for you Steve which is God uh on average firstborns score slightly higher in IQ
00:42:13
tests than their younger siblings agree to disagree I'm joking you're welcome to
00:42:18
disagree on that no I'm joking I'm joking and that that does uh that does make sense the major mechanism that seems to explain it is what's called the
00:42:24
tutor effect which is if if you're the firstborn and you have younger siblings you end up teaching them a lot oh and
00:42:30
when you explain things you remember them better and you understand them better the best way to learn something is to teach it uh and the last born
00:42:37
doesn't have a younger sibling to teach and so sometimes they just miss out on that opportunity tiny tiny difference on
00:42:43
average you will find many brilliant laterborns uh many average intelligence firstborns so don't don't take anything
00:42:49
from that but it's an interesting finding to the point that you raised the other the other finding is that uh
00:42:56
laterborns tend to be more willing to take risks and become
00:43:01
Originals uh and my my actually my favorite example of this comes from uh research Frank Solway did on Sports so
00:43:08
this is a study of every um pair of brothers who ever played Major League Baseball so you've got two siblings same
00:43:14
family same parents same upbringing uh they all they both make it to the pros actually uh sometimes there's even a
00:43:21
trio uh and the question is which brother takes more risks when it comes to steal a base uh which you know in in
00:43:28
American baseball is is one of the riskiest things you can do because it's very easy to to get to get out uh
00:43:34
because you have to basically outrun a ball that's flying in the air uh and you have to outsmart a pitcher and uh uh a
00:43:40
guy who's ready to catch the ball and it turns out that the laterborns are much more likely to take those risks they're
00:43:46
more likely to try to steal a base and they are also more likely to um to succeed in stealing a base so you're a
00:43:53
last born why like where does this pension for risk Tak can come from what's what's your hunch about the mechanisms oh gosh um oh I know what it
00:44:00
is I know what it is cuz I saw it in your writing and I was like that's it it's my parents gave me way more freedom
00:44:06
when I was 10 years old and I I say this a lot but when I was 10 years old if I left the house and I didn't come home for two days there was no consequences
00:44:13
whereas I watched my sister try that when she was that same age and it was it was like we would call the police if she
00:44:19
wasn't if she wasn't home before like 10: would call the police and as they went through the cycle of having kids and they got to the fourth one it was
00:44:25
almost like I say this all time it was like they had assumed I was the age of the others and they assumed that their
00:44:30
job of parenting had been done and that's what I attribute it to because in that Independence in that void you can
00:44:36
start to experiment and you can start to learn and take risks and then you get the feedback from those experiments
00:44:41
which for me was starting businesses at 12 13 14 first kid in our family to not go to university um so it yeah it made a
00:44:49
lot of sense when I read about it and I also do believe that my all my siblings have a higher IQ than me I think if we
00:44:54
did an IQ test I think every one of my siblings would beat me on it and I think they would all agree my brothers my
00:45:00
brothers are geniuses compared to me Jason Works Jason my The Sibling that's a year older than me um went to two of
00:45:06
the best universities Etc he's a genius he's much smarter than I am but he will even say that what he learned from me
00:45:12
was risk he says this he said it this Christmas he was like when you came to my house at um when I was 18 and I slept
00:45:20
on his sofa um he goes he was in a university he was off to get you know
00:45:25
really really great job as like an actuary he had gone to the London School of Economics to study that and I was hit
00:45:31
this Dropout sleeping on his sofa because I'd stopped by London and he said to me at Christmas he was like the fact that you weren't
00:45:37
concerned about your future yeah it inspired me which ultimately led him to
00:45:43
quit his job in the city he was like I learned from you risk taking wow um and
00:45:48
yeah so that's amazing because you benefited from extra freedom and Independence and then you were able to
00:45:54
actually pay that back to an older brother I I think for me that's also the most compelling reason
00:46:01
why laterborns end up taking more risks and trying new things there is another theory that has some support uh that I
00:46:06
think might be an additional piece of the story which is um usually the the firstborn ends up sort of impressing
00:46:13
parents by being a conventional achiever and then the thinking is that that Niche is filled and as a later born you got to
00:46:19
find a way to stand out like well getting good grades in school is not going to differentiate me from my older
00:46:24
siblings they're always going to be ahead of me so let me try something that's a little bit Road l traveled oh I
00:46:31
completely relate to that as well risk-taking it is often believe that risk taking is a key factor in what
00:46:37
makes entrepreneurs successful in their life but your research and your work in Originals on in chapter one page 17 kind
00:46:45
of starts to debunk that myth in a I think a really liberating way this this is good news for me as as somebody who's
00:46:52
not a big risk taker uh it turns out that risk takers are more likely to become entrepreneurs but the most
00:46:58
successful entrepreneurs don't love risk um they take they take cautious risks
00:47:04
and they're they're constantly trying to figure out how to reduce the downside um and increase the upside you know I guess
00:47:11
this goes into two directions One Direction is to say if you never take a risk that's actually a risky way to live your life it's like um it's like
00:47:18
building a stock portfolio where you only invest in safe predictable mutual funds no you need a balanced portfolio
00:47:25
um you're actually safer if you have some risky Investments and some more cautious Investments and I think life is
00:47:31
like that too I think on the the other side of that though you don't want to just be throwing caution to the wind and
00:47:37
making a bunch of dumb bets uh what you want to do is you want to figure out what's the probability of this unproven
00:47:43
idea succeeding and then do whatever you can to raise those
00:47:48
odds interesting because that's not the story we hear in the movies and in the you
00:47:55
know it and I guess that's part because we want to frame ourselves as Heroes when we tell our own story and so framing oneself as a hero involves
00:48:02
showing a huge uh courageous risk you took whereas really when I think if you
00:48:07
you're saying if you zoom in you'll see how the best entrepreneurs Protected Their downside of that risk yeah yeah I
00:48:14
think that's critical so let's go back to Elan for as an example uh I had dinner with him a few years ago um sort
00:48:21
of interested in what what can we learn from from what's worked for him uh and then also what hasn't and I was talking
00:48:28
to him about risk-taking and he you know he was talking a lot about wanting to to put the first humans on
00:48:35
Mars and I said how how could you possibly be willing to to gamble on that
00:48:41
it seems so unlikely and he said well when I you know when I first started I
00:48:47
knew it was extremely low probability and so that wasn't the original mission for SpaceX the mission was I want to
00:48:52
build a reusable rocket and that's much more real real istic and I can get people on board with that and I can get
00:48:58
a government contract to do that and I said okay quantify this for me like what are the odds that that you're going to
00:49:04
make it to Mars in your lifetime and he said well you know a couple years ago uh
00:49:09
I would have said I don't know seven 8% I'm like and and you're doing this
00:49:15
despite that and he said well no no the probability has gone way up since then I'm like okay tell me more and he
00:49:21
said I'd probably say 11% chance now this is firing you up he's like come
00:49:27
on that's double digits like we're we're close to reality but I think that calculus of saying I've got to know that
00:49:34
this is unrealistic and I've got to have a sideb which is something that can build me a viable company um and you
00:49:41
know reusable Rockets are what did it um that's what made SpaceX work it's not the mission the moon shot or actually
00:49:48
it's a Mars shot uh that that's not what what ultimately allowed them to do what they
00:49:53
do now is is that in part on his behalf a bit of a framing thing to um as you said get people on board
00:50:02
because I think about nurlink in the same way when when he first started talking about neuralink it was all about interfacing with AI and our need the AI
00:50:09
is coming and we need a way to be able to interface with it because it's going to be so much smarter than us that we basically need to become these cyborgs
00:50:15
and in more recent times he's focused on the ability to give um people who have
00:50:20
lost access to their limbs the use of their limbs back and I was thinking about the transition there he's done in messaging
00:50:26
the latter this idea of helping people who are disabled regain their ability seems to be an idea that people will get
00:50:32
on board with and will fund the other idea of interfacing with AI and us becoming cyborgs doesn't appear to me
00:50:38
like something people would get behind and fund no they either don't get it or they don't want it yeah yeah exactly not
00:50:45
for me yeah this is this is a common challenge for for original thinkers is
00:50:50
sometimes their bold Visions are just not palatable to other people uh and there's a term that I love that uh
00:50:55
Deborah Myerson and Moran Scully coin they talk about being a tempered
00:51:00
radical which I think is a great phrase to say take your your big extreme idea
00:51:07
and try to moderate it to make it a little bit more familiar and a little bit closer to what other people think is
00:51:13
plausible and desirable and then if you do that successfully uh you can smuggle your vision inside a troan horse and
00:51:20
that's all about bringing them with you interesting let's talk about people then people in teams um so one of my
00:51:28
real obsessions is is the topic of Team culture and it's something that you write about um in part two of your book
00:51:33
team culture what are we what are we generally missing about what it takes to be and to build a great team what are
00:51:42
what are some of the sort of first myths that come to mind about the greatest teams that you your work has
00:51:49
debunked well this is this is one of the big Topics in in my world of organizational psychology and there are
00:51:55
I think a bunch of findings that that might surprise people the the first one is that uh we Elevate the wrong people
00:52:02
to leadership rols consistently uh there's research on What's called the babble effect which is
00:52:08
the idea that the more you talk in a meeting the more likely you are to get selected as the leader of a team so we
00:52:16
reward people who dominate the conversation even though they are not actually better at leadership and often
00:52:22
they're worse because they fail to include and learn from the voices around them in the room they're so obsessed
00:52:28
with being the smartest person in the room that they fail to make the room smarter and I think what happens there
00:52:35
is that we're consistently mistaking their confidence for competence so we need to change that the
00:52:42
people I want to elevate into leadership roles uh are are basically people who bring generosity and humility to the
00:52:49
table uh generosity is about saying I'm going to put my mission above my ego and
00:52:54
I'm going to try to to make everybody in the room better and I guess it's a form
00:52:59
of servant leadership and humility is about saying it's my job to know what I don't know and try to learn from every
00:53:07
single person I work with and I think the idea of being a lifelong learner is is something we throw around a lot but
00:53:13
we don't take seriously I think part of being a lifelong learner is recognizing that every person you meet is a
00:53:19
potential teacher every single collaborator of yours has lived experiences you you
00:53:25
haven't has expertise that you don't and if you fail to realize that you are stunting your own progress so I think
00:53:32
we've got to get humble givers into leadership roles because they're there to make the team successful I've always
00:53:38
had a suspicion that based on the size of the company and where it is in its life cycle that a slightly different
00:53:45
culture is required and and in your work you talk about these commitment cultures
00:53:50
now a commitment culture is that a cult I hope not the good ones aren't okay so
00:53:57
you're you're anticipating the baron and Hannon research on uh hundreds of of startups for 15 years and they compare
00:54:04
cultural blueprints where some Founders say I going to build a star culture I
00:54:09
want to hire the biggest Geniuses and the best talent uh and that's that's what's going to make us grade and other
00:54:16
Founders say no I want to be about commitment I'm going to focus first and
00:54:22
foremost about do you fit the culture do you live our mission and breathe our
00:54:27
values and then you run the horse race and ask which of which approach is more successful from a culture perspective
00:54:33
and lo and behold the commitment cultures win they are dramatically less likely to fail significantly more likely
00:54:40
to go public and you think we're good like we've we've hired people who are all in on our company they made us a
00:54:47
wildly successful startup and then guess what after these companies go public they grow at slower
00:54:54
rates why there's a a major risk that if you
00:54:59
are hiring on culture fit you are then saying I'm only going to bring in people who are similar to each other and you
00:55:06
end up weeding out diversity of thought and background and promoting group think interesting so okay you're all a little
00:55:13
bit too close to this the same painting you're you're replicating what's already working for you and becoming more and
00:55:19
more homogeneous and this is not to say the culture fit is inherently bad um you do want people align on your three to
00:55:25
five core values and that's important the mistake we make is when we look at fit we think about well I want a bunch
00:55:31
of people with the same personality traits and I want a bunch of people who you know who went to the same College uh
00:55:37
or you know studied the same subject and then you end up with a really narrow band of expertise and that leads you to
00:55:42
stagnate how important do you think the culture you're in is on your own chance of success and performance I often think
00:55:49
this I think we've we've been lucky even as a podcast team to be in a great
00:55:55
culture and I play out the scenario if you took one of our team members and
00:56:00
maybe move them to another culture how much would that impact that team member's personal performance and chance
00:56:06
of success oh actually there's H Boris gyberg studies this uh he studies what
00:56:12
happens when you're a star in one culture and then you move to a new organization uh so he studied this with
00:56:17
uh with uh Wall Street security analysts uh so Finance Finance professionals turns out if you were a star performer
00:56:24
your current fir and you leave for a new firm it takes you on average 5 years to recover your
00:56:30
star performance unless you take your team with you and then you maintain your star
00:56:37
status from day one what Boris argues is that we underestimate the importance of the people we rely on um to to do our
00:56:44
best work and this is not unique at all to Wall Street you can see it in research on um on cardiac surgeons where
00:56:52
um you know how um it's it's pretty common for surgeons to operate at multiple hospitals mhm uh well it turns
00:56:59
out that the more practice you have at hospital a the lower your patient mortality rate is at hospital a but then
00:57:06
when you go over to hospital B later that week it's as if as if you haven't practiced at all because you're with a different team uh they don't know your
00:57:13
strengths and weaknesses you haven't built effective routines together um you are much more interdependent than you
00:57:18
realize even if you think you're an individual expert uh you can see it in sports too uh it takes uh Pro basket
00:57:25
teams uh 3 to four years on average uh even if you've recruited a really talented team to maximize their their
00:57:31
odds of winning a championship because they just haven't figured out how to be effective together there's even um there was a NASA simulation years ago where uh
00:57:39
you had to do a you had to go through a flight simulator and uh some Crews were uh were exhausted they just come off of
00:57:45
a you know a multile multi-day um sleep deprived journey and others were
00:57:51
well-rested and it turned out that the um the well-rested Crews who were
00:57:56
strangers actually made more potentially catastrophic errors than exhausted Crews
00:58:01
that had just flown together and having a little bit of shared experience was enough to to compensate for the lack of
00:58:07
sleep now I'm not suggesting that we should have pilots fly together and only sleep for you know two hours a night but
00:58:13
the idea that that your history together was even more important than how alert you were is something I think we ought
00:58:19
to take really seriously gosh it's like a double- Ed SW sword though because so your history
00:58:24
together matters so you want to be you want to be with a familiar group of people however if you're too familiar
00:58:29
with them you're not going to come up with original ideas and be as creative and and Innovative as possible so that
00:58:35
it's a balancing act between familiarity and Novelty
00:58:40
in the by way of introducing new members to the group that have new ideas as it
00:58:45
relates to business that's exactly right okay and you you actually see this in the sports data um after that you know
00:58:51
three or four years of experience together uh the benefit of shared experience start to level off and maybe
00:58:57
the players get old part of it but their routines also become really predictable predictable to the opposition as well in
00:59:03
the context of sports other coaches can go they always do this they always do it like this this is how we'll defend
00:59:08
against it same thing is true in business I think it's one of the reasons why so much Innovation and disruption comes from the outside because inside an
00:59:15
organization people get so attached to the way we've always done it uh they fall victim to what's called cognitive entrenchment where they start to take
00:59:21
for granted assumptions that need to be questioned um and need to bring in outside Talent Fresh perspectives or
00:59:27
rotate yourself um shift your your country shift Your Role um shift the the
00:59:33
group of people you're working with go learn a new skill set in order to to get out of that entrenchment when you think
00:59:39
about and when you study companies and people that innovate and let's just
00:59:45
focus specifically stay on the idea of teams that innovate let's just I mean bring it
00:59:50
right back to the context of even you know this podcast this podcast team is actually about 30 32 33 people now
00:59:58
across the whole sort of business of the dire of a CEO um it's going well you
01:00:03
know we we we do well better than well yeah yeah yeah it's going well it's like you know we've done a good job I think
01:00:09
that's that's that's fair to say but there's a risk with that which is when you've been right several times you can
01:00:16
start to get a little bit creatively complacent and also I saw I think it was Morgan H's
01:00:22
book same as ever some research that shows when you are succeeding when you're like number one at the thing you
01:00:29
do teams kind of switch off creatively and they they go into a defense mode
01:00:34
which is okay this is how we've always done it and it got us to here so let's just keep doing it that way but to self-d disrupt almost doesn't make sense
01:00:42
you know and so I'm my question to you is from what you understand what is the best way to keep a team like ours
01:00:49
continually striving for the next thing even when the outside world thinks you do a lot of things right best example
01:00:56
I've ever seen was uh in a podcast episode I did at Pixar a few years ago
01:01:01
so let's go back to 2000 Pixar is at the top of its game they've completely
01:01:07
reinvented The Way That animated movies are made we we used to think you had to draw them now they do them by computer
01:01:13
um Toy Story is a huge hit uh they've got monsters they've got talking bugs and uh you know they're riding as high
01:01:20
as you can in the entertainment industry and what most companies would do in that situation is they would rest on their
01:01:25
Laurels and keep making films the way they've done them because like you said like we we should double down on our
01:01:30
success we know our core competencies we're getting a ton of rewards for it well Steve Jobs and Ed kull uh who you
01:01:37
know were were running the show were not content to rest on their Laurels and they knew that when you're succeeding
01:01:43
you actually have the most lack capacity to disrupt yourself uh which is of
01:01:49
course when most leaders are least likely to do it because they don't think they need to and they said we've got to
01:01:55
we've got to shake things up so they went and hired an unproven director uh named Brad Bird he was coming off a
01:02:01
commercial flop uh it uh his previous film had had been you know just a huge disappointment
01:02:09
uh in terms of box office returns and Brad came into Pixar and his charge was to change the way that they made it
01:02:15
animated films why uh because they wanted to keep getting better and they
01:02:20
wanted to keep innovating and Brad came in with a vision that he was told was
01:02:26
crazy for a new animated film he was told it was going to cost half a billion US Dollars and take 10 years to make
01:02:32
which is just a non-starter if you're a film studio and Brad got frustrated and he said all right you know what give me
01:02:40
he said I want the Pirates I want the black sheep I want people who are dissatisfied disagreeable and
01:02:46
disgruntled and I'm going to build a a band of Misfits to try to prove that
01:02:51
this movie can be made and that group ends up finishing in a three-year period
01:02:57
uh so they shaved a year at least off the original expected time uh they end up coming in under budget uh becomes
01:03:04
Pixar's most successful film ever uh wins uh wins them some major Awards uh
01:03:10
you might have seen it it's called The Incredibles and what I think is incredible no intended about that story
01:03:17
is a couple things one you know just the the will to to break something that's not broken deliberately I think that's
01:03:24
huge number two uh what Brad does is he discovers that there's a particular kind
01:03:29
of disagreeableness that's really valuable is not just being cranky and ornery for the sake of it it's not being
01:03:35
a a complainer brad says I want people who are like racing cars stuck in a garage like they're they're just being
01:03:41
stifled and you know shot down and I'm going to open the garage and let them go um so in my give or taker framework I
01:03:48
would call those people disagreeable givers uh they're Gruff and tough on the surface uh but they're doing it because
01:03:54
they want to help and they have ideas to make things better and they're they're not content to just stick with the status quo and there there's a bunch of
01:04:01
research to suggest that people who are highly disagreeable um if they're doing if if they're challenging people because
01:04:07
they care uh they they actually end up driving more Innovation and so I've I've
01:04:12
actually started advising leaders that most of us know the value of a support network and surrounding ourselves with
01:04:18
mentors and colleagues who who have our back but what you actually need to get better is a challenge Network uh a group
01:04:24
of thoughtful critics who you trust to hold up a mirror so you can see your own blind spots more clearly and Steve this
01:04:30
is not the norm when I work with leaders and Founders um I I I think it's pretty common actually um I I I don't want to
01:04:40
name a specific example here but I I have interacted with a fair number of of entrepreneurs and CEOs who I have this
01:04:46
vision of them coming into the office one morning and saying good morning and a bunch of people go great
01:04:53
point it's a scary way to live but you know this as you gain status and power it's
01:04:59
harder to get people to tell you the truth and that's why those disagreeable givers who are willing to challenge you are so
01:05:05
valuable how how do you um cultivate that what can you do to cultivate a
01:05:11
circle of dis disagreeable givers or just people that are going to tell you the truth well the first thing you do is
01:05:18
you pay attention to to who has actually been willing to push you mhm uh and you let them know that they play that role
01:05:24
in your life so I I've actually done this in the past couple years um I've had people who you know tore apart book
01:05:30
drafts for me people who told me I needed to go back to the drawing board on a an early version of a TED Talk and
01:05:36
I've gone to them and I've said hey you may not know this but I actually consider you a founding member of my challenge Network First Response what
01:05:43
the hell is a challenge Network because disagreeable people always talk like that now they don't but
01:05:49
uh I had to explain it and I said I know I haven't always taken your you know your challenges well sometimes I've been
01:05:55
defensive other times I've just been dismissive because I'm on a path and what you brought was diverting and I
01:06:01
regret that because I know I need you you have to push me to think again and question the way I do things so if I
01:06:08
ever you know if you ever hesitate because you're afraid of hurting my feelings or damaging our relationship
01:06:13
don't the only way you can hurt me is by not telling me the truth and the particular conversation I found really
01:06:19
powerful there is to let people know that they often feel a a tension between
01:06:24
honesty and loyalty I don't I don't see a trade-off there for me honesty is the highest
01:06:29
expression of loyalty the more candid and direct you are with me the more I will value your input and sometimes
01:06:36
that's enough in other cases I have to go a step further which is something that that I I explored in some research
01:06:42
turns out that sometimes asking people for input uh doesn't get them over the hurdle uh they're still afraid or they
01:06:48
think it's just an exercise in futility so what you have to do is criticize yourself out loud and and say here are
01:06:54
the things I think I'm bad at here are the current shortcomings I see in my work and what you're doing then is
01:06:59
you're not just claiming your open to feedback you are proving you can take it so in that instance where you critic
01:07:06
criticize yourself out loud and you say God I'm so bad at this or that is in
01:07:12
part why you're doing that to make it a safe space for them to then build on
01:07:17
what you've just said yeah you're trying to create psychological safety as Amy Edmonson describes it and in some
01:07:23
research I did with Constantino cerus uh we found that When leaders sat down and
01:07:29
you know didn't just say I want to know what I can do better at but said here are the things that I think I need to work on a year later when they were
01:07:36
randomly assigned to do that their teams actually uh were were more willing to speak up and and challenge them and and
01:07:42
give them constructive criticism and I think part of what happens when you do that and I I actually do this in my own
01:07:47
classroom um I uh I I read students some of the toughest feedback I've gotten in my career one said that I reminded uh I
01:07:54
reminded them of a muppet never told me which Muppet thanks for that uh there was another where um a
01:08:01
military leader had written I gained nothing from this session but I trust the instructor got useful
01:08:09
Insight not fun at the time but what I find is when I read those comments out
01:08:15
loud afterward I hear much more honest input from my students they tell me things that they think are not going
01:08:21
well in my class they give me new ideas for improvement and I think what I've done there is I'm showing that I take my work really
01:08:28
seriously I don't take myself that seriously and you know I'm sort of unoffendable is the goal and um
01:08:36
sometimes they build like they'll you know they'll they'll say yeah we see that weakness and you still need to work on it and other times they say well
01:08:43
maybe you have a blind spot you didn't tell us about this area where you're struggling but we see this here Steve I
01:08:49
I have to say a lot of people get the concept that are afraid to do it because they don't want to admit what
01:08:56
they're bad at to the people who who work with them well guess what the people you work with every day they
01:09:03
already know what you're bad at you can't hide it from them right so you might as well get credit for having the
01:09:10
self-awareness to see it and the humility and integrity to admit it out loud on this point of teams as well um
01:09:16
and groups of people the other thing that was quite challenging that I that I loved that you discuss is this idea that
01:09:21
brainstorming doesn't really work well and to maximize collective intelligence we get more and better ideas when we
01:09:28
work alone and again it kind of there's a through line here with what we said at the start about procrastination and the
01:09:33
use of boredom one thing that's really helped me recently that I wanted to share and see if there's any resonance with you is when I have ideas usually
01:09:41
when I'm alone to be fair um or when I'm reading or when I'm thinking or writing about something I then write them out
01:09:46
into memos now which is just like a couple of pages for me to understand them and then I share them with people
01:09:52
before I didn't do that before I was a bit more of a pepper I.E I take something I was thinking about
01:09:57
and just pepper it into like a group chat whereas now having time and space to write about it seems to be helping me
01:10:04
to refine the ideas better but just helps me to come up with better ideas my question here is about how groups of
01:10:09
people form their best ideas and what you would suggest based on the research well you're you're living the evidence
01:10:15
so let's uh yeah let's let's unpack this a little bit I think Decades of research
01:10:22
on brainstorming have shown that if you get a group of people together to generate ideas if instead you would put
01:10:27
them in separate rooms and let them work alone you would have gotten more ideas and also better
01:10:32
ideas a lot of people are surprised by this and there are a few reasons behind it that that have good support one is
01:10:39
called production blocking we can't all talk at once some ideas get lost two is ego threat I don't want to look like an
01:10:45
idiot so I bite my tongue on my most unconventional ideas and then three is Conformity pressure which is sometimes
01:10:52
called the hippo effect um my favorite acronym hippo stands for the highest paid person's
01:10:57
opinion interesting as soon as that's known people jump on the bandwagon uh and you get too much convergent thinking
01:11:04
not enough Divergent thinking how do we get past that in in
01:11:09
organizations what is it about anonymity with ideas it can be if you're in a low
01:11:14
psychological safety environment where people are worried about their reputations then yes Anonymous ideas
01:11:19
help but I want to get to a point where people are willing to put their names on their ideas so I want to go in the direction that that you've gone
01:11:25
personally which is uh psychologists recommend brain writing as an alternative to
01:11:31
brainstorming what you do is you recognize that writing is not just a tool for communicating it's a tool for
01:11:36
thinking when you write out your thoughts you can't get away with a half-baked idea that kind of is sold by
01:11:43
your charisma you actually get tested on your logic and what you do is recognize
01:11:49
that individuals are more creative than groups they have more brilliant ideas they have more variety than groups to
01:11:55
but they also have more terrible ideas than groups and so we need a process to to generate variety and then filter
01:12:03
toward quality and what brain writing does is you have everybody write down their own separate ideas then you
01:12:08
collect them and you have everyone do independent ratings so you get their their judgment preserved before they're
01:12:14
biased by what their peers think then once you have all the ratings uh you take the most promising ideas and You
01:12:20
Begin developing and refining those and what you're trying to do then is to take the wisdom of crowds to to make the the
01:12:27
ideas with high potential succeed and I think for me brainwriting is one of the best ways to unlock the hidden potential
01:12:33
in the group because it is not the loudest talker it's not the most enthusiastic speaker who necessarily has
01:12:39
the most compelling ideas I was thinking as you're talking about how I might Implement that into
01:12:45
some of my teams and I was thinking about so how would you create anonymity of the the submission of the idea
01:12:50
without people having some idea based on the way the person's writing who it is you know what I mean because there's
01:12:56
some people in art I think in my teams that you'd be able to just know from how they wrote something who it was um
01:13:02
here's an idea yeah thinking out loud uh one thing I've tried from time to time is uh I've paired people up to then
01:13:11
write down and Pitch each other's ideas oh okay so you're separating the the person who had the thought from the way
01:13:17
it's being communicated and I I wonder if rotating a little bit that way could help oh interesting okay so you could
01:13:22
have one person read out all the ideas basically to a full group and then having them right independently or yeah
01:13:28
interesting potential why did you why did you write this book hidden
01:13:34
potential I I wrote it I wrote it really for two reasons um one is that I saw in
01:13:39
the evidence that we underestimate potential in ourselves and others consistently we think you can judge
01:13:46
where people will land from where they start but as we talked about with prodigies earlier um you can't always do
01:13:52
that and I'd read some some classic research on world-class musicians artists athletes and scientists showing
01:13:59
that they rarely stood out as better than their peers early on uh their early teachers their coaches even their own
01:14:06
parents didn't know how much potential they had and when they did stand out it was not for unusual ability it was for
01:14:12
unusual motivation uh they were they were driven they were passionate and I I
01:14:17
wanted to dispel the myth that if you're not instantly good at something you should walk away from it and only play
01:14:22
to your strength and I wanted to do that in part because it wasn't just the evidence that spoke to me I live this right I was a terrible
01:14:29
springboard diver when I started I never would have imagined that I was going to be a Junior Olympic National
01:14:35
qualifier um I as we talked about I really struggled with public speaking I didn't expect to go there and I also um
01:14:42
I failed the writing test uh when I arrived at University and was assigned to remedial writing and here I am an
01:14:48
author and so I've lived hidden potential along with studying it and I I felt like it was time to put those ideas
01:14:54
out into the world do you really do you believe that your potential exists somewhere or do you think it's something
01:15:00
that you create every every time you push yourself can I say both yeah yeah
01:15:06
yeah it's probably the yeah that makes a lot of sense I've always wondered this I've always wondered if I'm if my life is the pursuit of my potential or if my
01:15:13
life is the creation of my potential that that is a brilliant question I love the way you frame that I I think it's
01:15:20
always a little bit of both because we all have different know skills and strengths that come naturally to us and
01:15:25
different challenges uh that that are hardwired and so you could say like I I had a ceiling on my athletic ability
01:15:32
right like I there just there's certain things I'm never going to be able to do uh as as badly as I wanted to become a
01:15:37
professional athlete uh but a big part of of me learning how to become a decent diver was was trying to raise that
01:15:44
ceiling and uh after I retired uh Eric my coach said to me that I got farther
01:15:49
with less Talent than any diver he' coached which I wasn't wasn't sure if that was a compliment but it actually is
01:15:54
a huge compliment because he felt like i' you know I'd stretched my capabilities and I think for me hitting
01:16:01
potential is about realizing that we all have capacities for growth that are invisible to us and sometimes to the
01:16:07
people around us as it relates to unlocking that growth and being that overachiever that
01:16:14
you were as it relates to diving is there anything we haven't discussed that is critical to unlocking
01:16:19
that potential I think so uh I think throw some of those things at me yeah so
01:16:25
one of my favorites so can I tell you a little story please one of one of my other challenges
01:16:31
is as a diver was uh I was afraid of heights and I also was afraid of extreme
01:16:36
pain there's nothing there's there's nothing fun about you know doing a belly flop uh when you know you're up on a 3
01:16:43
meter springboard never mind a 10 meter platform which I avoided like the plague and I was especially afraid when
01:16:49
it was time to try a new dive because I was going to hurl myself into midair Spin and twist get lost and there's a
01:16:55
high probability that you're going to smack so I would stand there at the end of the board shaking uh I would waste a
01:17:01
lot of time in practice uh sometimes it would be 5 minutes 10 minutes one practice I stood on the board for 45
01:17:07
minutes and I wouldn't go I was wasting my time I was wasting my team teammates time I was wasting my coach's time and
01:17:14
Eric finally said to me he said Adam are you going to do this dive and I'm like ever like yes of
01:17:22
course one day I will do this dive and he said great then what are you waiting
01:17:27
for and I've heard that voice in my head every time I've been afraid to take a
01:17:33
risk and I've been hesitating to go outside my comfort zone I heard it when
01:17:39
I was afraid to write my first book and I didn't think I was ready I heard it when I was considering giving a TED Talk
01:17:46
and I didn't feel capable of doing a good job at it I think the lesson I took from that was I thought that I had to
01:17:52
build my confidence in order to take the leap and that was completely backward you build your confidence by taking the
01:17:59
leap and so I I was kind of waiting for the magic day when I felt ready and the
01:18:04
reality is you become ready by putting yourself in situations that you don't think you can excel at
01:18:11
yet do you think that's enough to push people off the board as as a sort of an analogy for
01:18:18
Life generally because there'll be so many people that have just heard that and hear just hear hearing that will
01:18:24
enable some of them to take the leap and then there's this other stubborn crowd that will hear that that will understand
01:18:30
it that will believe it's true and they still won't take the leap they still will stay in that job they still won't
01:18:36
push themselves beyond their zone of comfort is there anything else that's required to get th those people over the
01:18:42
edge or is it too individualistic to to know well I think one thing that that group of people might have in common is
01:18:49
a pervasive impostor syndrome MH right the the sense that well first of all let's when people talk
01:18:55
about imposter syndrome sometimes they say okay like I'm a fraud and it's only
01:19:01
a matter of minutes until everybody finds out and that feeling is actually pretty rare what's much more common if
01:19:08
you look at the research of Bim Tuk is impostor thoughts everyday doubts about
01:19:13
am I as good as other people think I am am I ready for this world that other people are encouraging me to take on um
01:19:19
can I afford to you know to quit my job and and try becoming an entrepreneur and
01:19:26
what the research suggests is that there are actually some surprising benefits of having those impostor thoughts Bima
01:19:32
finds she studies uh medical professionals investment professionals military cadets students that when you
01:19:38
have more frequent imposter thoughts they actually can become fuel to motivate you to persist toward your
01:19:44
goals and the reason that happens is there's a gap between what other people think you're capable of and what you
01:19:50
feel prepared for and you realize okay I've got to put in extra effort and I've got to be better at listening to other
01:19:56
people and learning from them in order to close the gap so bima's advice is when you feel like an impostor you
01:20:02
should recognize that other people think you're pretty pretty amazing and now all right let's live up to those
01:20:08
expectations and I would go even further I would say it's it's really tempting to
01:20:14
to trust your own judgment of your abilities above other people because you know more about yourself than any other
01:20:19
human can possibly know about you but here's the problem you know too much about yourself to compare yourself
01:20:25
accurately to others and you're also not neutral right you can't be objective and independent and unbiased so I think what
01:20:32
you want to do is you want to you want to see yourself Through The Eyes of people who know you well and if multiple
01:20:37
people believe in you it's probably time to believe them give me one more let's make this
01:20:44
the closing one as it relates to realizing our potential and unlocking our hidden
01:20:51
potential which is you know if if I if I was able to achieve anything with this podcast over the time that we ran it
01:20:56
allowing people to realize and pursue their potential I think would be one of the greatest achievements that we as a
01:21:02
team could have achieved by doing this podcast it's something that I just think I think people's much of their happiness
01:21:07
much of their fulfillment um much of their health probably lies in the pursuit of their potential whatever that
01:21:12
means and all of the opposite stuff much of their dissatisfaction their unhappiness probably lies in their um
01:21:19
their regret and their understanding that they can and could have done more in their lives I mean you think about Brony we all the time that study she did
01:21:25
on those paliative patients where so many of them wish they lived the life true to themselves so many of them wish
01:21:31
that they'd taken that jump and pursued that thing that was maybe a little bit more risky so what is the closing argument
01:21:37
here for those people that are trying to unlock their hidden potential well I think if if you look at
01:21:45
regret psychologist find that our biggest regrets in the long run are not our failures they're our failures to try
01:21:52
and it's it's the actions not taken that we wish we could redo the
01:21:57
most I think finding the the motivation and the courage to take those risks is
01:22:04
is not always easy for people and I think one thing that I found helpful over time that that has some good
01:22:10
evidence behind it is a lot of us know we need other people's input in order to
01:22:16
get better so what we do is we ask for feedback and the problem with asking for feedback is you end up with a bunch of
01:22:22
cheerleaders and critics the cheerleaders you don't fully trust because they see you through
01:22:28
rose-colored glasses and they just applaud your best self the critics are devastating they attack your worst self
01:22:35
we want our coaches people who see your hidden potential and help you become a better version of yourself and see I
01:22:41
mean Steve you you've seen this forever uh worldclass athletes and musicians and actors have coaches we all need coaches
01:22:48
in our lives and they don't have to be somebody we hire you don't have to have a budget um there're people that you
01:22:53
rely on who are part of that challenge Network who enable you to keep growing so how do you get your cheerleaders and
01:23:00
critics to be better coaches what you do is instead of asking them for feedback you seek their
01:23:05
advice when you ask for feedback people look at the past if you ask for advice
01:23:10
they turn to the Future and they become more specific and More actionable in giving you tips and
01:23:16
suggestions so if you go back um I I'll give you the the personal example on this one go back to the military leaders
01:23:23
that I taught who told me that uh they gain nothing from my session but they hope I learn
01:23:28
something uh I I've got a bunch of critics in that situation and you know they're they're demoralizing me I want
01:23:34
to give up I'm like wonder if I could I could actually build the ability to
01:23:41
hibernate and then in a few months I'll feel better but I had committed to teach a
01:23:46
second session for these military leaders and it was about a week later I didn't have time to reboot all my
01:23:51
content and so I went to my critics and tried to turn them into coaches and I asked them for advice on what to do
01:23:56
differently in the next session and one of them said a big mistake I made was I led with my
01:24:01
credentials and uh I tried to convince them that I was an expert well I was 25 years old these are season military
01:24:08
leaders they've got uh multi-billion pound budgets they've got thousands of flying hours under their belts they've
01:24:14
got Top Gun style nicknames uh I'm not I'm not going to convince them that I am more experienced than they are and this
01:24:22
this one person said you know you should try calling out the elephant in the room be a little more
01:24:27
vulnerable so I walk in the next week I look out at the room and I say all right
01:24:34
I know what you're all thinking right now what could I possibly learn from a professor who's 12 years
01:24:40
old silence and then one guy call S sandun jumps in and he says that's
01:24:47
ridiculous you got to be at least 13 they all vers out laughing it broke
01:24:53
the ice I more or less taught the same material but the feedback was much more positive afterward uh they told me that
01:25:00
although I was Junior in experien I dealt with the evidence in an interesting way and they liked learning from somebody who was almost as young as
01:25:06
the Millennials they were they were trying to lead and I learned from that experience that the the very people who
01:25:11
were it felt like they were trying to take me down if I asked for their advice instead of their feedback they actually
01:25:17
gave me a tip That Built Me Up it made me think about something that I learned from reading work which is this
01:25:23
difference between self-promotion and idea promotion as well um I actually sent it to a friend earlier on my friend
01:25:29
runs a personal branding companies called Ashley the company's called great influence and he spends his time
01:25:36
basically helping leaders build their personal brand and he'll often send me
01:25:42
things that he's seen online and when I read about your concept of self-promotion versus idea promotion I
01:25:48
realized that all the things he sends me that are bad are self-promotion and all the things that he sends me are good a
01:25:53
fundamentally idea promotion what is the distinction just so we're clear I think
01:25:58
the the distinction for me is that self-promotion is about saying look at me let me tell you about all my
01:26:03
accomplishments and awards I'm going to show off my trophies and I'm trying to impress you and make you think that I'm
01:26:09
great idea promotion is saying I have something worth sharing and I want to
01:26:14
elevate a product a service an insight and people have dramatically different reactions to the two right the first
01:26:21
comes across as narcissistic and bragging and self-centered um the second
01:26:26
is actually seen as an act of generosity um you're taking your knowledge and your skills and you're trying to create a
01:26:32
gift for other people uh and hoping that they receive it and I think this is so important because a lot of people don't share their ideas they don't put their
01:26:39
work out there because they're afraid of looking like their self-promoting and they are doing such a disservice to the
01:26:44
world um by not releasing their
01:26:49
creativity so so many people have a problem with that so you know so many people have a problem especially when they're they're making a transition from
01:26:56
being someone who was quiet or silent to that first post that first book that
01:27:01
first um and and part of that is because of the impact it has on the people
01:27:08
that know you so for for me for example the first time I wrote like a quote or an idea online I felt that anxiety of oh
01:27:17
my God my friends from school are going to think I think I'm like mahat Mandi or like Nelson Mandela or something because
01:27:23
I'm sharing my ideas and the sheer fact that I'm sharing my ideas means that I think I've got good ideas and I think
01:27:28
I'm smart and so the best thing to do is just not to share the ideas so that my friends don't judge me for whatever
01:27:34
reason I managed to persist and I shared an idea and I actually in the early stages of sharing my ideas on the internet I got some feedback from my
01:27:41
friend Jamie that told me one of our mutual friends was like criticizing me he was saying like who the [ __ ] does he
01:27:46
think he is this was like n years ago maybe who the [ __ ] does he think he is he thinks he's
01:27:52
Etc that was difficult persisted and I'm so glad I did because it changed my life and I think of so there's so many people
01:27:58
that are in that exact moment where they've got ideas they've got skills that they could share it would transform
01:28:04
their lives and add value to the lives of other people but they're stuck because yeah they're scared of it
01:28:09
feeling like self-promotion I believe everyone has ideas worth sharing and
01:28:15
that we have a responsibility to not deprive the people around us from learning and I think the the Great thing
01:28:22
about the democratization of knowledge is that anybody can access anybody else's ideas uh and so I think there's
01:28:27
an opportunity for all of us to put our thoughts out there this this might be an unpopular opinion but I don't think the
01:28:33
framing as personal branding is helpful because it it Center stages self-promotion I don't want to have a
01:28:39
brand when people tell me I said something on brand I feel like I've been typ cast or I'm losing my authenticity
01:28:46
what I want is I want to have a reputation I don't want to be a shiny product that's packaged with a bunch of
01:28:52
slogans um I want to be somebody who's known for a set of values uh and you know one of those values is um is
01:29:00
original thinking and rethinking and that means I should even disagree with my own ideas if I don't contradict
01:29:06
myself I am failing to learn gosh I remember after give and take came out uh
01:29:12
I got I got branded as the the nice guys finish first guy for the givers over taker message and I was so annoyed by
01:29:18
that first of all because a lot of givers aren't nice um helping other people is different from being polite to
01:29:23
them uh and the disagreeable givers were a case in point of that and eventually I
01:29:29
was like maybe maybe my next book needs to be called take and take and write about why selfish [ __ ] succeed just
01:29:36
because I'm I'm so committed to evolving what I think and I don't think you do
01:29:42
that if you're trying to maintain a personal brand uh that's you know that's that's consistent in representing a
01:29:49
certain slogan I think you do that if you're trying to live a set of values
01:29:56
amen it really has made me rethink um rethink not just the term personal
01:30:01
branding but really the purpose of the true purpose of idea promotion is the pursuit of truth right and knowledge and
01:30:08
um in the process of that you obviously gain a ton yourself we talked about earlier I think they they often call it the Fryman technique where by writing
01:30:14
and sharing you're actually learning more than anyone else I think it was James clear that said the person that learns more in any in any most in any
01:30:21
classroom is in fact the teacher but this this this the importance of being okay with being inconsistent being
01:30:27
continually wrong your old work can contradicting your new work um is very
01:30:33
important but not easy to do because because of the cognitive dissonance that admitting your wrong creates this is a
01:30:40
central question of think again and I I I'm I'm so struck um I originally
01:30:46
learned this framework from Phil tlock and then I I started studying it I'm so struck by how many people's spend too
01:30:52
many of their waking hours thinking like preachers prosecutors and politicians so when you go into preacher
01:30:59
mode you're prizing your own ideas in prosecutor mode you're attacking somebody else's ideas and in politician
01:31:05
mode you don't even bother to listen to people unless they already agree with your ideas and I I I always like to ask I
01:31:12
find that that most people have a dominant style that gets them in trouble so mine is prosecutor mode if I think
01:31:18
you're wrong like it is my professional and moral respons responsibility to correct you which never goes well and
01:31:24
I've even been called a logic bully which my wife had to explain to me was not a compliment I think I'm a logic
01:31:31
bully are you I think so sometimes fellow prosecutor I it's my it's maybe
01:31:36
this is an excuse so maybe I'm bullshitting myself here but when I hear an idea I think part of
01:31:44
my persuit of learning is by challenging it and that's not always a good thing
01:31:51
especially when it's your girlfriend and she's just trying to tell you something and you're like no but logically and I read this study and I
01:31:56
did this podcast it's like you don't need to interact with people like that all the time I I make this mistake all the time
01:32:04
and I you know I Allison calls me out regularly like you you you actually do
01:32:10
not need to argue with an idea to understand it uh and you don't have to pressure test every single you know
01:32:16
Point that's made um sometimes you can listen and learn from other people as opposed to duking it out to try to
01:32:22
figure out who's right and I think it's such an important note because in
01:32:27
prosecutor mode you've already concluded that other people are wrong and you're right so you you lose the ability to
01:32:34
open your mind and the same thing happens if you're preaching or politicking uh you know you're you're
01:32:39
basically drinking your own Kool-Aid or listening only to your own tribe and trapping yourself in an echo chamber and
01:32:45
so I got really curious about how do we how do we get out of those modes what's an alternative and my favorite alternative is to think think more like
01:32:51
like a scientist when I say think like a scientist I do not mean that you need to buy a microscope or you know a telescope
01:32:59
I mean that you don't let your ideas become your identity that you recognize every
01:33:04
opinion you hold it's just a hypothesis you can test it every
01:33:09
decision you make just an experiment it might it might succeed it might fail and when you do that it turns out when
01:33:16
people people can be taught to think more like scientists when you teach people to see their opinions as hypotheses their decisions as
01:33:22
experiments lo and behold they make better choices they achieve more success because they become more flexible they
01:33:27
change their minds faster they're quicker to recognize that they're wrong and that means they're quicker to get it right but if if Jack had loads of ideas
01:33:35
and every single time any idea came out of his mouth even if it was a good morning and we all went Jack you're
01:33:41
you're so right it's hard to see how Jack's self-esteem or his ego doesn't
01:33:46
take a boost there and him become more committed to being right in the future because cuz then imagine if we did that
01:33:52
for one year as an experiment then suddenly we turn around one day and go Jack what are you talking about that is wrong you can imagine his his ego you
01:33:58
know swelling and going what so I guess what I'm trying to say
01:34:05
is how difficult it is for us to
01:34:10
disassociate our selfworth with being right yes yeah I've a colleague once
01:34:17
told me that the worst problem he sees in humanity is the addiction to being yeah and I think it's much more
01:34:23
important to focus on getting it right than being right and one of the ways you
01:34:29
do that is you do not let your beliefs become part of your self-concept so people wait what what do
01:34:37
you base who are you if you're not what you think you are what you value what's
01:34:43
the difference between values and beliefs beliefs are what you think is True Values are what you think is
01:34:49
important and I think this is such a a critical distinction because when you start to to base your identity your
01:34:55
sense of self and your your your ego and your self-esteem and self-worth on what you think is true then admitting you
01:35:02
were wrong is a major threat whereas when you start to see yourself as
01:35:07
someone who values curiosity or is a lifelong learner now changing your mind
01:35:13
is a moment of growth so a simple example um before evidence-based
01:35:19
medicine there were a lot of um people who call themselves doctors be like oh
01:35:24
you're feeling anxious let's give you a frontal labotomy you think that's an effective way to
01:35:30
treat anxiety that's a belief of yours right if that becomes part of your identity if you're if you see yourself
01:35:36
as a professional labotomy you are never going to believe the evidence that this is harmful if you see yourself instead
01:35:43
as somebody who helps treat anxiety and that's your value the moment you read the careful evidence saying this is not
01:35:49
working and it's also really dangerous is the moment you change your mind and so I think what this means fundamentally
01:35:56
is you have a set of principles that you stay true to but you're very flexible when it comes to your practices and
01:36:02
policies I'm G to do my very very best Adam I try at your own risk yeah I'm gonna try Adam thank you thank you for
01:36:09
all the work you do because you um you forced me to challenge myself over and over again in the in all the books
01:36:15
you've written But Central to all the books you've written is the idea of challenging oneself which I think is one of the most important messages which is
01:36:21
just this continual Pursuit Of Truth knowledge and um questioning the status
01:36:28
quo and then questioning that and I think that that process of sort of iterative experimentation that humility
01:36:34
that um ability to maintain the student mindset throughout your career is the
01:36:40
path to success in both your professional Pursuits but also your personal ones one of the things that's really helped me in my relationships is
01:36:46
this idea of um remaining humble to new information and facts you embody that as a human being but you embody it in all
01:36:52
of your work and your work is original and that's why it's so challenging something I aspire to in the work that I
01:36:57
make is to to to go those extra lengths to create wonderfully original work I I sometimes sit on this show and I will
01:37:04
recommend someone to go and buy one of the author's books but in in this case I
01:37:09
can't because I think people need to buy them all they all offer something so um challenging in a very important way the
01:37:16
hidden potential is the newest book right that's the that's the brand new that came out in October last year didn't it mhm but they're all essential
01:37:22
books for different chapters and different perspectives and different phases of life so I'd recommend everybody go by all three of the books
01:37:28
that I have in front of me here which is the originals think again and hidden potential get them as a nice little package deal on Amazon because they are
01:37:35
really important books to push your thinking forward and that's exactly what you've done for me as an entrepreneur you've pushed my thinking forward so a
01:37:41
huge thank you from myself but also for the millions of people that have benefited from your work thank you
01:37:46
that's incredibly generous of you and it means a lot to me considering the source because uh you are original and one of
01:37:53
the things I love about Diary of a CEO is you are constantly challenging people to rethink their ideas um and to try new
01:37:59
things and unlock their hidden potential so um you're you're doing what I study on this show and uh I think it's amazing
01:38:06
um and you know not anyone can make Malcolm Gladwell cry uh I uh I I I've known him for over
01:38:13
a decade I've never seen him break down into tears before or since so uh well done there wow before we wrap I I have a
01:38:21
couple questions for you oh go ahead uh I snuck a couple in as we were going but there there were a couple things I was curious about if you're game I feel why
01:38:28
do I feel nervous you should I'm turning the tables here you should feel nervous isn't this cool every single
01:38:35
conversation I have here on the dire of a CEO the very end of it you'll know I asked the guest to leave a question in
01:38:41
the Diary of a CEO and what we've done is we've turned every single question written in the Diary of a CEO into these
01:38:49
conversation cards that you can play at home so you've got every guest we've ever had their question and on the back
01:38:57
of it if you scan that QR code you get to watch the person who answered that
01:39:03
question we're finally revealing all of the questions and the people that
01:39:09
answered the question the brand new version two updated conversation cards
01:39:14
are out right now at Theon conversation cards.com quick one if you guys have
01:39:20
heard me speak on this podcast before about company culture and the secret to building a world-class company you know that everything starts with people which
01:39:26
brings me to our sponsor on this podcast which I'm very excited to announce today which is LinkedIn jobs the entrepreneurs
01:39:33
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and terms and conditions apply that's a free job post so go get it now uh first question is where do you think your
01:40:21
hidden potential Li I think my hidden my hidden potential relies in what you would typically think
01:40:27
of more creative mediums like music and uh theater and things like that I think
01:40:35
that's where my my hidden potentialized and I think much of the reason I haven't ever pursued it or unlocked it is because I've lived under this limiting
01:40:42
belief that I don't have the right to because I'm a my identity says
01:40:49
entrepreneur and time to your identity yes and also because I'm just not good at I'm not as good at it as people that
01:40:56
I think of as like musical or you know it's only in re you're not good enough
01:41:02
yet exactly and okay so you're not Beyonce today yeah
01:41:07
beonce but if I committed more time to it and I could get over the initial hurdle of the Delta between me and
01:41:13
Beyonce maybe I'd pursue it and maybe I'd become it but I think that's where my hidden potential lies is is in the
01:41:19
creative things and I think it's in part cuz I have when you've succeeded at something it reinforces your identity as
01:41:25
that thing and that can trap you in a box it can uh what's something I can do better as a podcast guest oh gosh um
01:41:32
question or writer or thinker or you know anything when I think about great podcast guest on this show what they do
01:41:38
well is they start with stories and then they hit us with some kind of stat Factor um study to reinforce that and
01:41:46
then they kind of follow with a conclusion and we we I can tell in the Preamble um whether the podcast is going
01:41:51
to do well basically based on that the way that they deliver their information I'll say sometimes I fail on that I
01:41:57
think there are a couple moments where I started with the data because that's where my energy begins where I could have led with story yeah I think that
01:42:03
would maybe be it is one of I learned from one of our speakers that the more obscure and surprising the start of
01:42:10
their response obviously the more the viewer leans in so if I said for example um if
01:42:17
you asked me a question and then I responded with
01:42:23
if I look into your left eye I can make you fall in love with me because it's so logic bully I don't
01:42:29
believe that for a second but I want to hear more exactly and it's the lean in and so I was thinking of Dr tus W for
01:42:35
example when she came on she she would often start her her point with a really obscure provocative open and it would
01:42:42
make you lean in before we started the podcast I was like she is going
01:42:47
to bang as a podcast did the podcast put out there 9 million views on YouTube
01:42:53
She's a Smash Hit And then she went on to other people's podcast Smash It smash It smash It smash It smash it and what I
01:42:58
identified in the Preamble was the way she told stories you do that well if there was an opportunity to close the
01:43:05
gap from the nine out of 10 you are to the 10 of Excellence if that exists it would be just to do that more frequently
01:43:11
something I'm trying to do so thank you that that's enormously helpful and also overly kind I uh I I think part of what
01:43:17
you're talking about is what the heath Brothers have called a curiosity Gap uh where you put out a puzzle and then
01:43:23
it becomes social scientists actually talk about it as an itch that you have to scratch like I got to know more about
01:43:30
that and that that's what leads you to to kind of um lean in on that I I think that's a great note and that's
01:43:36
definitely something I need to work on I'm always worried when I go on a podcast that the story is too long and I want to have a conversation as opposed
01:43:42
to just an interview and if I were you know if I were writing it in a book or if I were giving a talk on stage I would
01:43:48
you know I would of course tell the story but like does the story interfere with the the dialogue and I think I need
01:43:54
to let go of that because first of all there's no reason why you can't tell a short story and second of all some of
01:44:00
the best stories take a couple minutes to unfold oh 100% I think all the best things are are stories I think it's the
01:44:06
the way that the brain finds it most compelling to learn um I'm going to have
01:44:12
the last question because it's a tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest not knowing who they're leaving it
01:44:17
for so the question that's been left for you they sign it that's unusual what is your first historical rather than
01:44:25
personal memory I the first time you realized there is a big world out there
01:44:31
unrelated to you and your friends and family
01:44:36
wow what an interesting question you know I don't know if this
01:44:42
was the first it's the most Vivid it was 1989 I was eight and I heard Billy
01:44:48
Joel's song We Didn't Start the Fire and I had never heard of most of the references in that song I was like
01:44:55
what's studa Baker I knew what television was uh I like what happened in North Korea and South Korea and I
01:45:02
ended up doing a project just a a personal project to get the backstory of
01:45:07
every reference in that song and that I didn't know it but that was the first research project I ever did and I guess
01:45:12
it was foreshadowing wow that is an obscure answer that I wasn't expecting I was expecting some kind of like World
01:45:19
tragedy or something or that's so interesting that's the one I remember Adam thank you thank you this has been a
01:45:25
joy and an honor appreciate you so much thank you right back at
01:45:30
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01:46:26
to your local Tesco boots or sains spres or online and you can grab and try one
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there you need a podcast to listen to next we've discovered that people who liked this episode also tend to
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absolutely love another recent episode we've done so I've linked that episode in the description below I know you'll
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enjoy it
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[Music] ah