September 5, 2018 • 41 mins
Educator turned celebrated speaker and bestselling author, Adam Grant, explains the gift of Vuja De.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
And there's people who you know well. They tend to
travel in the same circles, and they know a lot
of the same things that you do, and so they
give you redundant information, whereas your week ties are much
more likely to meet different people, to know different things,
and they give you more efficient access to novel information,
which is one of the reasons why you're more likely
to get a new job through week tied in a
strong tie. Hi, and welcome to you terms. Because shift happens.
(00:35):
I'm Lisa Oz and I'm Chill Karzig, and we are
here talking about change um because all of us, because
heck it, shift happens. All of us go through periods
in our lives when the trajectory we were on suddenly
changes and we find ourselves an entirely new situation. Um.
(00:57):
Sometimes we choose to make those changes. Sometimes it is
precipitated by fate forces outside our control exactly. Sometimes these
changes are great and wonderful, like a new job or
graduation or new romance. Sometimes those changes are traumatic and
devast dating. And our guest today is an expert in
(01:20):
both of those types of changes. Yes, we are here
with Adam Grant. So Adam, you are an organizational psychologist,
and I love how you explain this. I think you
say that you work to help people learn how to
make work work not suck, but I also feel like
you're an expert in making life not suck. Um. You
(01:42):
are the host of Work Life with Adam Grant. What
you do with Ted is one of their Ted podcasts. Um,
you've done two Ted talks that I know about anyway,
and together they have more than twelve million views. So
that's pretty incredible. And that's not even to mention the
three best selling book that you've written, UM, Originals, Give
(02:02):
and Take an Option B, which you wrote with Cheryl
Sandberg after the death of her husband Dave, when she
was looking for recovery and direction. Um. And I found
all of these books incredibly helpful and fascinating in very
different ways. Wow, thank you so Adam. Can you talk
a little bit about you turn or several you turns
(02:27):
in your own life? Was there a time where you
started out going one way and then found yourself and
going the opposite direction? Yeah, there have been a lot
of them. Where do you want to start your favorite one? Oh?
Are we are we supposed to like you turns? Some
of them, right, I think we're supposed to be honest
about them, the fact that we might really not like
(02:49):
them while we're going through them, but hopefully they lead.
Some are good. The one that you learned the most from, Yeah,
well all right, let me let me give you a
few and you can choose. So there was the one
in high school. Actually it goes back to middle school
where I was. I was cut from the middle school
basketball team all three years of trying out, and then
(03:10):
I decided to focus completely on soccer. And then I
didn't make my high school soccer team, and I turned
to diving and became completely obsessed with it and fell
in love with it, and it it changed my life
for the better. That was one, okay, a slow, gradual, painful,
but ultimately triumphant. You turn triumphant because diving is a
(03:32):
nerve sport and the people I competed against were way
less talented than in basketball and soccer. But I don't know.
When I look at divers, they look pretty talented to me.
But go ahead, give us, give us another U turn.
You learned something then, when let's see, when I was
in college, I ran for the presidency of this this organization.
It was actually a student company, and I lost, and
(03:55):
I decided that I wanted to be an academic instead
and study all the things that I'd doing as a manager.
And then I guess in two thousand eleven, I got tenure,
and I had to figure out whether I was going
to continue justifying writing articles that very few people ever read,
(04:16):
or whether I was gonna share my work more broadly.
And I decided to write a book. And I thought
I was just going to write give and take and
then go back to research and teaching as usual. And
it's completely shifted the way that I spend my time.
And it seems you know, I read about you that
you used to be terrified of public speaking, and obviously,
you know, in order to share your work more broadly,
(04:36):
you had to get over that um. And that's that's
how twelve million views happened. So can you tell us
how you how did you do that? I mean that
that was that could have prevented a you turn if
you hadn't been able to do that. Yeah, I forgot
that one, but that happened too well. I remember I
remember in college being in classes where I was just
(04:57):
riveted by the material and ending the whole lecture, trying
to work up the courage to raise my hand, and
then in small seminars, I decided I was going to
go to get over it, and I would. I would
literally physically shake as I thought about the prospect of
speaking up. And when I got to when I got
(05:17):
to grad school, I knew that I had to learn
how to teach. And you know, a big part of
why I went was I wanted to teach. I was
passionate about sharing ideas. And what I did was I
volunteered to give guest lectures in other people's classes. You know,
I figured it was better to ruin theirs than mine. No, no,
I just it wasn't time for me to teach my
(05:38):
own classes yet. And so I said, I'm gonna get
over this by putting myself in a harder situation where
I don't get to spend a whole semester building relationships
with students and finding out what they're interested in. I'm
just gonna stand up and give lectures for this crowd
of strangers. And so I I gave a couple of these,
and every time I gave out feedback forms and asked
for all the things that I should do differently, and
(06:00):
some of the comments were brutal. I remember one student
writing that I reminded them of a muppet. Told me
which one? You know? Jerry's still out? And another wrote
that I was so nervous that I was causing them
to physically shaken their seats. Wow, So how do you
deal with that kind of feedback? But what gets you
to give back up on the stage after? Because I
(06:23):
would just crumple up in a ball at that, yeah,
and decide maybe maybe I'm headed in the wrong direction,
maybe that maybe this is from you. I would be
ruminating over what kind of muppet I was? Anyway, how
did you get frog? But I would definitely say you've
(06:43):
got a kermit. You'll take that as a compliment. There
are worse options on the table, for sure, but the
best Yeah, you know. I think three things happened. The
first one was there were some compliments about the material,
and so it was clear that even though my delivery
was terrible, that people were interested in what I had
to say. So I felt like I had to find
a better way to communicate it and get more comfortable
(07:05):
putting it out there. The second was that I knew
I wanted to be a professor because professor's changed my
life and I wanted to try to pay that forward,
and I couldn't do it without getting better at public speaking.
And then I think the third thing that happened was
I realized that I had sort of climbed a version
of that mountain before, which is starting middle school, I
(07:28):
began performing magic, and by high school and in college,
I was doing magic shows. And that was a performance
where I did public speaking in front of audiences. But
it didn't feel the same because I had a script
and I'd rehearsed the tricks over and over again, and
so I thought, Okay, I need to retrace those steps
that I took as a magician now as a professor.
So does that mean that you are an uber preparer
(07:51):
for your lectures? Mean? Do you do you try and
iron out every wrinkle before you stand up there? Oh?
Not anymore, but I used to. Yeah, he confessed in
one of the Ted videos that you called a precraftstinator. Chill.
You're like that too, where you said four months before
it was due, you started panicking. Oh at least right, Yeah,
(08:13):
I mean as a precrastinator, I feel the urgency to
get something done now. That might be due years down
the road. I'm also this weird mix of optimists and
defensive pestimists, where you know, the optimistic part of me says,
I can figure this out right, I'm I'm a good learner.
I like rising to challenges. There's there's nothing that I
(08:34):
can't figure out. The defensive pessimist in me then starts
to think about the specific performance coming up and imagine, Yeah,
I remember in school thinking, all right, I'm not just
gonna bomb this test. I'm gonna do so badly that
my teacher is going to take away points on my
previous exam because there's no way I could earn them.
Has that ever happened? Something that's never I was afraid
(08:58):
that it might, you know, or teachers can be creative,
so you know, but I would I would start to
just picture worst case scenarios, and then that would that
would just make me feel really anxious, and then that
anxiety would propel me into preparation, and then by the
time the performance came around, I was mostly ready. Okay,
So there's a moment for that kind of pessimism when
(09:19):
you're trying to motivate yourself to do something. But there's
also a moment for optimism. How do you how do
you know? How do you make that transition? Because I mean,
I gotta tell you, I have such a mean voice
inside my head sometimes, and that voice, Oh my god,
what a batch. And and she's also a bit of
a slave driver, as Lisa knows. I mean, that's what
she's that's what she's referencing here. Um, and I'll just
(09:42):
kind of invent flaming hoops that I have to leap
through in order to feel prepared for something. But I'll
also kind of invent obstacles in my mind imagine I'm
going to get through them. So how do I know
when that's self defeating and when that's motivating? How does
somebody like me, like us make that switch? I don't know, Joe.
I'm not that kind of psychologist. Not suck. Yeah, my
(10:06):
job is to fix other people's jobs, not given therapy.
So you know, I wish you luck with that, but
thank you. No, I don't. I don't actually know that
you can know going in. I think that the way
the way I've I've come to look at this is
I think it's great to be an optimist when you're
making the decision about whether to start a project or not,
(10:30):
because you know, you ought to be excited about the
idea and see potential in it, and that gives you
some momentum and sort of kick start your motivation. And
then once you've committed, I think you want to shift
over into defense of pessimism and start imagining all the
ways that you know that you might flop to make
sure that you're you're not complacent. And then I think
you know, as you get closer to you know, the
(10:52):
completion or the delivery or the performance, I think that's
when you want to get back into optimistic mode again
so that you bring you know, the most energy into
usyasm to the table. But I don't I don't know
how to know exactly when each is appropriate or how
to get yourself in each of those modes. So I
think your guest is as good as mine. All Right, Well,
thank you for the guidance. Um after the break, we're
(11:13):
going to come back and you're going to explain a
term that I found in one of your books. Day Oh,
we'll get into it. Before the break, we talked about
how procrastinators like Jill and Adam deal with upcoming tasks.
(11:38):
But in your book Originals, Adam, you basically explored a
different tactic someone more like me. Um, It's sort of
I'm the the anti precrastinator. Um, I am the quintessential procrastinator.
Since I read your book last night, a real wait
a minute, a real procrastinator would be part way through
(11:59):
it right now. Well, I didn't read the other toy.
I only had Originals because I'm a narcissist as well
as just kidding. Anyway, one of the things that you
talk about in Originals is this concept that Jill mentioned,
vusia day. Um, I mean the opposite of deja Can
you talk about that a little bit? Yeah, I love
(12:21):
this term. I got it from from Karl Wike, who's
a fellow organizational psychologist. And Carl said that, you know,
we we love having these moments of vada, which is,
you know, in his words, you know, i've if if
devo is you know, I'm in this new situation and
it it feels sort of familiar. Is the opposite. You're
(12:46):
in a familiar situation, but you're like, I have no
idea how I got here and where I'm going. I'm
totally lost. But there's he said, there's a positive version
of that, which which can really unleashed creativity, which is,
you know, when when you're experience bugey, you're looking at
something you've seen hundreds or thousands of times before, but
you're seeing it with fresh eyes as if it's brand
(13:07):
new again. And that allows you to you know, to
take an innovative vantage point on what might be an
old problem and and that can sometimes lead to interesting ideas. Well.
That's that is kind of fascinating thought because we're sort
of dealing with the idea of feeling stuck in different
phases of your life. And it's really a lot of
(13:28):
it's about seeing your life differently, isn't it. And are
these moments? Can they just be things that strike you
out of the blue, like you wake up one morning
and you think, you know, hey, I should be doing
this not that. Yeah, absolutely, I think it does for
all of us. But I think that sometimes we don't
notice it because we're too focused on our goals and
you know, we we haven't opened up our peripheral vision
(13:49):
to even sort of catch those those perspectives as they
sneak their way in. Yeah, well that's where the procrastination
comes in. Handy right, allows it gives you the time
to reflect on I guess, on what you're doing. You
had some stories about procrastinators and originals that showed that
there was actually some advantage to not doing everything way
(14:10):
ahead of time. There can be Yeah, So Gysian and
I studied this in some companies and we also designed
some experiments, and we found that people who are moderate
procrastinators tend to be more creative than procrastinators or extreme procrastinators.
And at first it was it was hard to get
data on the procrastinators because they never showed up for
(14:31):
our studies. But you know, eventually, eventually we figured it out.
And what seems to be the case is that if
you're a procrastinator like me, you make the mistake of
rushing forward with your first idea, which is rarely your
best idea, and it's it's the one that came to
mind first, it was the most obvious. And if you're
an extreme procrastinator and you wait till the very last minute,
(14:53):
you have to rush forward with your easiest idea because
you don't have time to work through the you know,
the more creative or more complex. And so there's this
sweet spot you know that that Leonardo da Vinci seemed
to live in Steve Jobs, Martin Luther King Jr. Abraham Lincoln.
All of them were quick to start, but often slow
to finish. You know, they would they would dive into
(15:14):
a problem or question early and then say, all right,
wait a minute, but I don't wanna I don't want
to finish it now, just because I want to have
a sense of closure and completion. I want to keep
my mind open to incubating. And I think for a
lot of us, we feel like if we're taking our time,
we won't be first out of the gate, and then
we can't win. And you say, that's not the case
(15:35):
necessarily either. Well, the first mover advantage turns out mostly
to be a myth in in the world of companies
and businesses. So I think, you know, there are there
are times when you want to move first. So if
you're dealing with patents and technology, or if they're big
network effects, you know, like in social media, where the
more people join, the more valuable your you know, your
(15:56):
your network is, it can be useful to be first,
But in most other cases there's actually a first mover
disadvantage because the people who move first have to put
all their energy into creating the market, and then someone
else can just swoop in and make it better. It's
much easier to improve on someone else's idea than, you know,
than to create yours from scratch. Which is why I
(16:19):
think that, you know, very frequently it's not the pioneers,
it's more of the settlers who are able to come in.
You know. I think of like a Magna Vox who
you know, kind of helped invent video games, and then
Nintendo licensed their technology and then came up with a
much better version of it, and you know, it was
able to piggyback on all the work they had done
(16:41):
to open up that that domain. And you see this
happen over and over again, right. It's it's part of
the reason that the Google came in way after a
whole generation of search engines. And you know, I think
there's there's more to that than people often realize. So
you can be an original, but you don't necessarily have
to be your regeneral version. No, you don't have to
(17:03):
be first. You just have to be different and better, Okay,
and sometimes hanging back a little bit lets you know
how you're going to be different and better. That's interesting.
I think we we always talk about how the early
bird gets the worm, but no one ever mentions that
the early worm gets caught. Don't be the worm. I'm
(17:24):
going to sling something out at you because it really
surprised me. Um. It seems like you are down on gratitude,
like you the whole gratitude list thing, which I feel
like everyone in their brother tells you to turn to,
and for Heaven's sakes, you know, start and finish your
day with that moment of gratitude. Not your thing. Well,
(17:45):
it depends on where you try the line. So I
feel like my job as a social scientist is to
look at the evidence and figure out what works for
most of the people most of the time. And Sonya
Lubermerski has these interesting studies where she shows that it's
better to keep a gratitude list once a week than
once a day. It seems like if you do it daily,
(18:06):
it starts to get repetitive, and then you also run
out of meaningful things and and pretty soon you're like, wow,
I'm really grateful for you know, the paint that's on
my wall and it's dry. And if you do it weekly,
you know it stays fresh, and you're able to focus
maybe on on some more meaningful things that that you
truly do appreciate. And then I found in some of
(18:28):
my own work that gratitude can be a fleeting emotion.
So I did these studies with a colleague, Jane Dutton,
where we studied university fundraisers and we randomly assigned some
of them to keep gratitude journals and write about things
that they appreciate it at work, and there was no
effect whatsoever on their effort in the next few weeks.
(18:48):
They didn't make more calls, they didn't spend more time
on the phone, and it seemed to be the case
that you know, gratitude sort of put them in a
passive position, right, It's all about what you've received from others.
And we thought, how do we get how do we
get these these people to feel more active? And we said,
what if instead they kept a contribution journal, where, you know,
rather than reflecting on what they received from others, they
(19:10):
were journaling about what they gave to others and how
their actions made a difference. And the callers who kept
those journals actually spiked an effort by about fifty a week.
So you know when you wrote about what you'd contributed
to others, it reinforced, Hey, I make a difference. My
actions matter, other people value me, and then it's much
(19:31):
more likely that you're going to step up and and
try to help others when you have opportunities in the future.
And so you know, I think, I think there's value
in counting your blessings, but you should also count your contributions.
It sounds like good advice does, especially since those people
were asking other people for money. But I but I
(19:53):
get it. I mean, they were also probably saying to themselves,
I'm doing something for this cause, and the cause is
really important and got him going. I just want to
push back a little bit on the gratitude thing, just
because of something you said and a talk with that
you and Cheryl Senberg were giving words, Yes I am
that's what I don't do that. That's so cruel. I'm
(20:14):
not a hypocrite. Well, there was just a point where
you said where when she said, all right, I'm using
her words against your Is that more fair? Um? She
said that when she was in her deepest, darkest hole.
You said, it could be worse, So be appreciative for
what you know. Where you are, even though it's a
(20:34):
really dreadful place. And she said, what are you talking about?
You worse and said, well, you said that you're that
her husband could have been driving her kids when he
had his a rhythmia. So suddenly she said she was
so blessed and appreciative and grateful for the fact that
that wasn't the case, that it completely adjusted her outlook.
And that was sort of like when she was able
(20:56):
to crawl out of that hole and start rebuilding and
stopped feeling sorry for herself. And she says, she was
good after that. So taking stock of your blessings, I
think can help you with a change, right, Yeah, of course,
I But I wasn't suggesting that she journal about that
every day, right, and you know, constantly count the things
(21:18):
that she was grateful for. I do think, you know,
this might be a little different in the context of
you know, acute stress or a tragedy, where you know,
if if you're ruminating on, you know, on a horrible event,
and you know you're in Cheryl's case, she was just
thinking through all the things that she could have done
and felt she should have done to save her husband.
(21:40):
And you know, no matter how many times, her neurosurgeon
brother said to her, even the doctors didn't catch this,
there's no way you could have got this. She's still
in some way felt responsible. And so, you know, I
think the one of the lessons there is, you know,
if you're if you're stuck in ruminating about the past,
you shouldn't just compare the past to what could have
(22:01):
been better, you also should compare it to what could
have been worse. You know. It's a little bit like
in a much more mundane setting. I often see with
my students who who complain a lot about fomo, the
fear of missing out, which is one of those things
that apparently only millennials experience, you know, when when you
actually sit down and think about that, what what is fomo?
(22:23):
It's about assuming that you could be doing something else
that's better, but you also could be doing something else
that's worse. And so I love this term that Oliver
Brookman coined. He talks about joemo, which is the joy
of missing out and to give out how glad you
are that you're not doing all these boring things that
a lot of your friends are stuck doing. And so
(22:43):
the point is, if you know, if you're gonna engage
in what psychologists called counterfactual thinking, where you know, you
imagine the present or the past being different from what
it is or was. You should you should make the
upward and the downward comparisons the better and the worse. That. Yeah,
they can always imagine that they're in a working class
with a really boring professor instead of coal one with
(23:06):
the ted talk. I don't think anyone has ever called
me cool before. Okay, there you go, hanging on the wall.
I mean it obviously sounds like you were an incredible
ally to share all through through this awful period she
was going through. Um, you know, how do you find allies?
(23:29):
You talked, You talked about the importance of finding a posse,
people who can support you. How do you know who
to how to build that team or is it sometimes
not the people that you think you should have one
on that team? Yeah, you know, It's it's funny because
I've always gravitated towards people that in psychology we'd call agreeable.
(23:50):
So agreeableness is one of the major dimensions of personality.
And you know, you think of agreeable people as warm, friendly, polite, welcoming,
nice people, and disagreeable people are more critical, skeptical, and challenging.
They're also much more likely than their peers to go
to law school. That's another conversation. And you know, I
think that I've I've always had this inclination to to
(24:13):
reach out to and lean on agreeable people because I
know they'll be cheerleaders and you know they are in
those one on one conversations. But agreeable people love harmony,
and that means they tend to leave two big gaps.
One is that they're not very good at questioning you.
So you don't just need a support network, you also
(24:33):
need a challenge network, right, not not just people who
who kind of affirm everything that you're doing, but but
people who push you because they care about helping you improve.
And agreeable people are a little less likely to do
that because they don't like conflict. And then the other
thing is if you're if you're let's say you're making
a U turn in the sense that you know you've
quit your job and you're trying to start a business,
(24:54):
agreeable people are not great advocates for your ideas with
others because they don't want rock the boat and they
don't want to pitch an idea that somebody else might
not like. It's the disagreeable people who are you know,
willing to challenge you because they want to help you,
and who love fighting that uphill battle. And we'll stand
(25:15):
up for an idea that's unpopular or unproven, and you know,
if you can get them excited about it, they will
run through walls for you. And so I think that
we should all stop underestimating the value that disagreeable people
and really bring to our lives. It's fascinating because you know,
in these down moments when we're making transitions, You're right,
we seek comfort and um, some of those you know,
(25:38):
more abrasive types who you know give us the tough love,
aren't aren't the ones we rushed to. I think we
need both. Yeah, I think we need the support and
they push forward. Yeah. I mean, you know, in my
sort of job searching um post being hip checked out
of a job in an industry, I've found that sometimes
it's the people who are not in my close network,
(25:58):
but in my secondary or even ter share network who
have the most interesting ideas for me, and they don't
know me from Adam. Really, I mean, they're just kind
of you know, I get them to meet me for coffee,
and they talk to me for a little while, and
they throw things out and some of some of what
they throw out is very challenging. But it seems like
they're not as um attached to one idea of me
(26:19):
or to making me feel better. You know, they just
they just meet me for coffee. They may never see
me again. They'll just tell me, tell me what they think.
The important thing is the fact that they're givers. And
Adam talk about that, right, how do you tell if
someone that you're sitting down getting advice from why you're
having coffee is a giver or a taker? Well, I
was going to say that if your acquaintances are giving
(26:39):
you better advice than your friends you meet new friends, No,
I think that. I actually I want to talk about
why why that's not true? But oyay, So first, you know,
I've spent a lot of my career studying this give
or take her distinction on the extremes, where you know,
givers are the people who are are constantly trying to
figure out what they can do for you, whereas takers
(27:01):
are all about what can you do for me? M m.
That's that's interesting. We're even going to come back to
that after the break, because this giver taker thing is
very important. I also want to talk about self compassion.
We can do that too. Okay, great, and we are
(27:24):
back speaking with Adam Grant about givers and takers, givers
and takers and finding the right balance of those people
in your life. Go ahead on him, tell us, well, first,
let's let's just talk about the friend acquaintance thing for
a second, because I feel like it's it's an important
distinction that often gets overlooked. So you know, in sociology,
(27:46):
when you study weak ties and strong ties, you often
find that people get better advice from their weak ties
than their strong ties. And you know, there's people who
you know well and have built a lot of familiarity
and trust with. They tend to travel in the same circles,
and they know a lot of the same things that
you do, and so they give you redundant information, whereas
your week ties are much more likely to meet different people,
(28:09):
to know different things, and they give you more efficient
access to novel information, which is one of the reasons
why you're more likely to get a new job through
a week tie than a strong tie. For example, Um,
but I wouldn't have known to call them weak ties.
They're just you know, awkward people to try and meet
for coffee. But um, but actually those have turned out
(28:31):
to be some of the most interesting meetings. You're absolutely right,
and they pop with ideas in a way that you know,
my my close ties, UM don't necessarily always, so there's
a way to get that without the awkwardness. There's a
third kind of tie, which is called a dormant tie,
and those are the people that you used to know
but lost touch with in the last three, five, seven years.
(28:54):
What's great about dormant ties is it's way easier to
reconnect with someone you used to know than to start
a connection and from scratch with someone you hardly know.
But unlike your strong ties, your dormant ties have been
doing different things. They've been connecting with different people, and
so they have that access to different kinds of ideas
and insights that you normally get from a week tie.
(29:15):
And so, you know, one thought is it's worth reconnecting
with one dormant tie every month, and you don't You
don't have to do it strategically or instrumentally. In fact,
there's some research led by Daniel Levin which shows that
people are horrible at predicting which of their dormant ties
are going to be helpful, because by definition, you don't
know what they know. And so you know, it's just
best to say, hey, who are the people that i'd
(29:36):
love to to get back in touch with. And there's
some studies where executives have been assigned to do this
and they grown and they say, but those ties are
dormant for a reason. And it turns out that most
ties are not dormant for a reason. We got busy,
we move, we changed jobs. We did not mean to
fall out of touch. And I think that we we
don't do as much to to reconnect as we should.
(29:58):
So we should go to our high school reunions. That
what you're saying. No, No, that's why we have social media.
You can skip the reunion, just find them on linked
In or Facebook. Thank you God, thank you, you know,
thank you Adam for giving me that permission because my
is coming up. I mean, talk talk about disruption, right,
Reunions are irrelevant? Now, Yeah, that they're absolutely true, except
(30:19):
that you know what, there's something about the serendipity of
running into running into someone that you didn't necessarily want
to run into that and and that can be really positive.
And because if I'm just scrolling to Facebook nope, nope, nope, nope,
nope and get to the end of my class, is like, no,
I'm not going to the reunion. But then if you're there,
you're kind of forced to talk to them and it
(30:40):
could be a beautiful thing. Yeah, yeah, I think that's right.
And you know, one of the things you discover actually
is you when you when you try to reconnect with people,
whether it's at a reunion or whether you're reaching out,
you you learned pretty quickly whether you've been more of
a giver taker, Right, So if if you've built up
a history of general people are thrilled to hear from you,
(31:02):
whereas if you've been selfish, they want to lock the
door to their network and throw away the key. You
can you never get in. Yeah, yeah, I mean in
that sense, what goes around comes around. But you know,
it is an interesting test, right of not not necessarily
whether you know you are a giver or a taker,
but you know, in that relationship and that interaction in
the past, how have you been perceived? So when you're
(31:24):
meeting with all these dormant ties and they're generating tons
of good ideas for you, Um, how do you know
which ideas to pursue? I mean, are you going to
become an aerial pilot or so? Don't you have away?
You talk about originals and and just the plethora of
ideas is not being a negative because I can see
(31:44):
that it would be a little bit. Uh, you know,
it can put you on stop when you're surrounded by
too many ideas too, because you could be bad at them. Yeah,
you know, I think the good news on this is
that original thinkers have more bad ideas their peers. And
I mean, the more horrible ideas you have, the more
(32:05):
creative you are. But there's actually there's a lot of
evidence for that, and you know, we see it amongst
scientists and musicians and inventors and artists, and it seems
to be that just highly original people have lots of ideas,
and when you're generating an idea, you're in an open
sort of creative mode, which is very different from what
(32:25):
you need to do to evaluate an idea, which is
kind of a different phase of you know, being more skeptical,
more discerning, more critical. And so you know, I think
in a lot of cases we're just bad at judging
our own ideas. I have a former student, Justin Berg,
who's now a Stanford professor, and Justin showed in some
research that if you have a list of twenty ideas
you came up with, you should rank them from favorite
(32:48):
to least favorite, and then your most promising idea is
not the one you rank first, it's the one you
rank second most often. Wow, that's fascinating because we were
a little blinder to our own ideas. Huh, exactly, And
that number two idea you have a little more distance,
You're able to see it with more objectivity, but you
also have enough passion, you know, to not only recognize
(33:10):
the flaws, but try to fix them. And so I'm
always a little worried when I think about this research
because people will just try to game the system and say, wait,
so if I take my favorite idea and I rank
it second, I'm good, No, don't do that. Well. I
find that I am absolutely full of ideas, um, but
I also get very self critical when I get overwhelmed
(33:34):
and I'm not falling up on them in the way
I think I should. You know, the flaming hoops that
I mentioned earlier, and one of the things you you
talk about is self compassion and having um, having that
for yourself. Moments where I guess, I hope I'm I
hope I'm getting this right, Moments where you just you know,
you give yourself some slack. Sometimes though I get nervous
(33:56):
that I have too much of that, there might be
too much slack. UM, how do you you know, how
do you find the balance between stagnation and um and
also just giving yourself some room. So here's what's interesting
this is this is Kristin Neft's work. She's a psychologist
who put self compassion on the map. She shows is
(34:16):
that self compassion is not about letting yourself off the hook,
and so slack might be the wrong way to think
about it. It's more about showing yourself the kindness and
understanding that you would give to a good friend who
was struggling in the way that you might be in
that whatever situation you're in. And so one of the
ways that that you're supposed to develop self compassion is
(34:37):
you think about a failure or a challenge or an
embarrassing experience you've had, and you write a letter to
yourself as if you were writing to a good friend
and give them the kind of encouragement and understanding that
you would normally show. That that doesn't mean you don't
take responsibility right. You wouldn't say to a friend, oh,
it's totally not your fault that you know that you
failed because you were unprepared. You would say, you know,
(35:00):
I see that this happened, but you know this happens
to everyone, and I know you'll do better next time,
and you might even give some tips on how to
do that. And so I think that same kindness can
be turned inward. And that's what self compassion is all about.
So is that sort of what you showed yourself when
you got all those negative reviews from from the students
you subjected to your terrible, terrible lecturing at the beginning.
(35:21):
Did you just was it partly like saying, look, there's
some good stuff in here and I'll get better as
I go along, and or were you not so good
at that then? You know? I I think it's always
a tight rope walk. I think what what I was
worst at in in that moment was was doing what
I probably would have benefited the most from, which was
(35:42):
just sitting down and watching myself on tape and being
able to see exactly what the students were seeing, and
I think I just would have processed it a lot
more quickly. But I think what would ended up working
for me was I started working with a teaching coach
and she videotape me, and I couldn't I couldn't bring
(36:03):
myself to watch it at the time. I've I've gotten
there finally, but she, you know, she would actually watch
the videos and then point out things that she saw
his patterns when she was watching me live. And you
know that that helped me just figure out. I realized
a big chunk of my anxiety came from sort of
not knowing what the right pacing was for an audience,
and you know, not knowing when I should stop and
(36:24):
make a joke and when I should pause and give
the audience a chance to reflect. And you know, what
what should my hands be doing when I'm giving his speech? No,
no one, no one ever knows. But I think that
you know, a lot of a lot of that was
was saying, Look, you know, I'm I'm not going to
be excellent at this today, but I believe this is
(36:48):
something I can do better tomorrow. So so you just
just go back to a little detail here. So she
watched the tapes and then give you feedback so that
you didn't have to or did you No, that's what
That's what ended up happening. Watch you like hid in
a corner while she watched them. That's kind of amazing.
It kind of reminds me of something I read a
(37:11):
piece in The Times recently. Um. It was it was
kind of casual, There wasn't much much data, wasn't wasn't
really driven by data, But it was this observation that
sometimes there's one huge thing that's holding us back and
you just need somebody to point out what your big
thing is. But your big problem is and maybe maybe
you don't have one, but a lot of us do.
They've got a we've got a big thing and we're
(37:32):
totally blund to it. Um. I mean, is it an
important thing, particularly when you're going through a difficult transition,
you need that guidance to to find someone will be
honest enough or or is that just like asking for brutality? Well,
I don't know. You know, I think a lot of
it depends on your personality and the culture that you're in.
(37:54):
I will say though, that you know Ultimately, the people
who I know who not only achieved the most but
also learn the most are the ones who are less
concerned with protecting their images and their egos and more
concerned with trying to attain mastery. And so, you know,
and there's there's a lot of research on this right
that if you're if you're always trying to avoid looking
(38:15):
bad or prove yourself to other people, that you don't
take the same kinds of risks and pursue the same
kinds of challenges that you do if master is your goal.
And so I think that, you know, at some level,
I would love to see more people say, yeah, you
know what, criticism sometimes hurts. I'm not always going to
enjoy hearing it, but I should crave it because that's
(38:39):
the only way I'm ever going to get better and
reach my potential. So, just before we wrap up, I
want to ask you one more question about another U
turn you've taken lately. You have kindly come on our podcast,
but you also have a podcast, which I think is
a fairly recent endeavor. Um, what what are you seeking
(39:00):
to to achieve? Is like building resilience through the digital stratosphere?
What what's this new adventure for you on podcasts. Well,
it's a few things. One, it's trying to reach people
who don't read books or seemed to read at all. Uh,
that that was that was part of the aspiration. Two,
(39:23):
I think that you know, I've spent the past five
years going into workplaces and you know, mostly I guess
sharing things that I've already know, and I wanted to
go out in the world and learn again, and I
thought a podcast was a great opportunity to do that
and then share the insights and the haws on the
back end. And then the third thing is I just
(39:44):
think it's a travesty that the majority of people spend
the majority of their waking hours at work, and so
many of us work in jobs that we don't find
meaningful and motivating. And I don't think we should tolerate that.
So I guess, you know, in some ways, work life
is about trying to if it's not just about making
work suck less, it's also about trying to make work
more meaningful and motivating. Well, we're so happy you're doing that,
(40:07):
thank you. Yes, I mean, honestly, I feel like I
learned so much from that podcast and I'm loving it.
And we will be listening UM for for our listeners
who I know also read books. UM. If you want
to follow Adam Grant, find him at Adam Grant Adam M.
Grant on Twitter and listen to this great new podcast,
(40:28):
to Work Life with Adam Grant, which is a TED production.
We are so thankful, UM, particularly since I've heard on
your podcast I free to talk about the importance of
saying no to things to keep work from taking over
your life. So you said yes to us and we
are so appreciative. Thank you Adam, well, thank you Lisa,
Thank you Jail. It was a delight to be here.
(40:50):
So let us know what you were facing right now.
Reach out to us on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram at
you Turns Podcasts. Thanks so much, See you next.
And there's people who you know well. They tend to
travel in the same circles, and they know a lot
of the same things that you do, and so they
give you redundant information, whereas your week ties are much
more likely to meet different people, to know different things,
and they give you more efficient access to novel information,
which is one of the reasons why you're more likely
to get a new job through week tied in a
strong tie. Hi, and welcome to you terms. Because shift happens.
(00:35):
I'm Lisa Oz and I'm Chill Karzig, and we are
here talking about change um because all of us, because
heck it, shift happens. All of us go through periods
in our lives when the trajectory we were on suddenly
changes and we find ourselves an entirely new situation. Um.
(00:57):
Sometimes we choose to make those changes. Sometimes it is
precipitated by fate forces outside our control exactly. Sometimes these
changes are great and wonderful, like a new job or
graduation or new romance. Sometimes those changes are traumatic and
devast dating. And our guest today is an expert in
(01:20):
both of those types of changes. Yes, we are here
with Adam Grant. So Adam, you are an organizational psychologist,
and I love how you explain this. I think you
say that you work to help people learn how to
make work work not suck, but I also feel like
you're an expert in making life not suck. Um. You
(01:42):
are the host of Work Life with Adam Grant. What
you do with Ted is one of their Ted podcasts. Um,
you've done two Ted talks that I know about anyway,
and together they have more than twelve million views. So
that's pretty incredible. And that's not even to mention the
three best selling book that you've written, UM, Originals, Give
(02:02):
and Take an Option B, which you wrote with Cheryl
Sandberg after the death of her husband Dave, when she
was looking for recovery and direction. Um. And I found
all of these books incredibly helpful and fascinating in very
different ways. Wow, thank you so Adam. Can you talk
a little bit about you turn or several you turns
(02:27):
in your own life? Was there a time where you
started out going one way and then found yourself and
going the opposite direction? Yeah, there have been a lot
of them. Where do you want to start your favorite one? Oh?
Are we are we supposed to like you turns? Some
of them, right, I think we're supposed to be honest
about them, the fact that we might really not like
(02:49):
them while we're going through them, but hopefully they lead.
Some are good. The one that you learned the most from, Yeah,
well all right, let me let me give you a
few and you can choose. So there was the one
in high school. Actually it goes back to middle school
where I was. I was cut from the middle school
basketball team all three years of trying out, and then
(03:10):
I decided to focus completely on soccer. And then I
didn't make my high school soccer team, and I turned
to diving and became completely obsessed with it and fell
in love with it, and it it changed my life
for the better. That was one, okay, a slow, gradual, painful,
but ultimately triumphant. You turn triumphant because diving is a
(03:32):
nerve sport and the people I competed against were way
less talented than in basketball and soccer. But I don't know.
When I look at divers, they look pretty talented to me.
But go ahead, give us, give us another U turn.
You learned something then, when let's see, when I was
in college, I ran for the presidency of this this organization.
It was actually a student company, and I lost, and
(03:55):
I decided that I wanted to be an academic instead
and study all the things that I'd doing as a manager.
And then I guess in two thousand eleven, I got tenure,
and I had to figure out whether I was going
to continue justifying writing articles that very few people ever read,
(04:16):
or whether I was gonna share my work more broadly.
And I decided to write a book. And I thought
I was just going to write give and take and
then go back to research and teaching as usual. And
it's completely shifted the way that I spend my time.
And it seems you know, I read about you that
you used to be terrified of public speaking, and obviously,
you know, in order to share your work more broadly,
(04:36):
you had to get over that um. And that's that's
how twelve million views happened. So can you tell us
how you how did you do that? I mean that
that was that could have prevented a you turn if
you hadn't been able to do that. Yeah, I forgot
that one, but that happened too well. I remember I
remember in college being in classes where I was just
(04:57):
riveted by the material and ending the whole lecture, trying
to work up the courage to raise my hand, and
then in small seminars, I decided I was going to
go to get over it, and I would. I would
literally physically shake as I thought about the prospect of
speaking up. And when I got to when I got
(05:17):
to grad school, I knew that I had to learn
how to teach. And you know, a big part of
why I went was I wanted to teach. I was
passionate about sharing ideas. And what I did was I
volunteered to give guest lectures in other people's classes. You know,
I figured it was better to ruin theirs than mine. No, no,
I just it wasn't time for me to teach my
(05:38):
own classes yet. And so I said, I'm gonna get
over this by putting myself in a harder situation where
I don't get to spend a whole semester building relationships
with students and finding out what they're interested in. I'm
just gonna stand up and give lectures for this crowd
of strangers. And so I I gave a couple of these,
and every time I gave out feedback forms and asked
for all the things that I should do differently, and
(06:00):
some of the comments were brutal. I remember one student
writing that I reminded them of a muppet. Told me
which one? You know? Jerry's still out? And another wrote
that I was so nervous that I was causing them
to physically shaken their seats. Wow, So how do you
deal with that kind of feedback? But what gets you
to give back up on the stage after? Because I
(06:23):
would just crumple up in a ball at that, yeah,
and decide maybe maybe I'm headed in the wrong direction,
maybe that maybe this is from you. I would be
ruminating over what kind of muppet I was? Anyway, how
did you get frog? But I would definitely say you've
(06:43):
got a kermit. You'll take that as a compliment. There
are worse options on the table, for sure, but the
best Yeah, you know. I think three things happened. The
first one was there were some compliments about the material,
and so it was clear that even though my delivery
was terrible, that people were interested in what I had
to say. So I felt like I had to find
a better way to communicate it and get more comfortable
(07:05):
putting it out there. The second was that I knew
I wanted to be a professor because professor's changed my
life and I wanted to try to pay that forward,
and I couldn't do it without getting better at public speaking.
And then I think the third thing that happened was
I realized that I had sort of climbed a version
of that mountain before, which is starting middle school, I
(07:28):
began performing magic, and by high school and in college,
I was doing magic shows. And that was a performance
where I did public speaking in front of audiences. But
it didn't feel the same because I had a script
and I'd rehearsed the tricks over and over again, and
so I thought, Okay, I need to retrace those steps
that I took as a magician now as a professor.
So does that mean that you are an uber preparer
(07:51):
for your lectures? Mean? Do you do you try and
iron out every wrinkle before you stand up there? Oh?
Not anymore, but I used to. Yeah, he confessed in
one of the Ted videos that you called a precraftstinator. Chill.
You're like that too, where you said four months before
it was due, you started panicking. Oh at least right, Yeah,
(08:13):
I mean as a precrastinator, I feel the urgency to
get something done now. That might be due years down
the road. I'm also this weird mix of optimists and
defensive pestimists, where you know, the optimistic part of me says,
I can figure this out right, I'm I'm a good learner.
I like rising to challenges. There's there's nothing that I
(08:34):
can't figure out. The defensive pessimist in me then starts
to think about the specific performance coming up and imagine, Yeah,
I remember in school thinking, all right, I'm not just
gonna bomb this test. I'm gonna do so badly that
my teacher is going to take away points on my
previous exam because there's no way I could earn them.
Has that ever happened? Something that's never I was afraid
(08:58):
that it might, you know, or teachers can be creative,
so you know, but I would I would start to
just picture worst case scenarios, and then that would that
would just make me feel really anxious, and then that
anxiety would propel me into preparation, and then by the
time the performance came around, I was mostly ready. Okay,
So there's a moment for that kind of pessimism when
(09:19):
you're trying to motivate yourself to do something. But there's
also a moment for optimism. How do you how do
you know? How do you make that transition? Because I mean,
I gotta tell you, I have such a mean voice
inside my head sometimes, and that voice, Oh my god,
what a batch. And and she's also a bit of
a slave driver, as Lisa knows. I mean, that's what
she's that's what she's referencing here. Um, and I'll just
(09:42):
kind of invent flaming hoops that I have to leap
through in order to feel prepared for something. But I'll
also kind of invent obstacles in my mind imagine I'm
going to get through them. So how do I know
when that's self defeating and when that's motivating? How does
somebody like me, like us make that switch? I don't know, Joe.
I'm not that kind of psychologist. Not suck. Yeah, my
(10:06):
job is to fix other people's jobs, not given therapy.
So you know, I wish you luck with that, but
thank you. No, I don't. I don't actually know that
you can know going in. I think that the way
the way I've I've come to look at this is
I think it's great to be an optimist when you're
making the decision about whether to start a project or not,
(10:30):
because you know, you ought to be excited about the
idea and see potential in it, and that gives you
some momentum and sort of kick start your motivation. And
then once you've committed, I think you want to shift
over into defense of pessimism and start imagining all the
ways that you know that you might flop to make
sure that you're you're not complacent. And then I think
you know, as you get closer to you know, the
(10:52):
completion or the delivery or the performance, I think that's
when you want to get back into optimistic mode again
so that you bring you know, the most energy into
usyasm to the table. But I don't I don't know
how to know exactly when each is appropriate or how
to get yourself in each of those modes. So I
think your guest is as good as mine. All Right, Well,
thank you for the guidance. Um after the break, we're
(11:13):
going to come back and you're going to explain a
term that I found in one of your books. Day Oh,
we'll get into it. Before the break, we talked about
how procrastinators like Jill and Adam deal with upcoming tasks.
(11:38):
But in your book Originals, Adam, you basically explored a
different tactic someone more like me. Um, It's sort of
I'm the the anti precrastinator. Um, I am the quintessential procrastinator.
Since I read your book last night, a real wait
a minute, a real procrastinator would be part way through
(11:59):
it right now. Well, I didn't read the other toy.
I only had Originals because I'm a narcissist as well
as just kidding. Anyway, one of the things that you
talk about in Originals is this concept that Jill mentioned,
vusia day. Um, I mean the opposite of deja Can
you talk about that a little bit? Yeah, I love
(12:21):
this term. I got it from from Karl Wike, who's
a fellow organizational psychologist. And Carl said that, you know,
we we love having these moments of vada, which is,
you know, in his words, you know, i've if if
devo is you know, I'm in this new situation and
it it feels sort of familiar. Is the opposite. You're
(12:46):
in a familiar situation, but you're like, I have no
idea how I got here and where I'm going. I'm
totally lost. But there's he said, there's a positive version
of that, which which can really unleashed creativity, which is,
you know, when when you're experience bugey, you're looking at
something you've seen hundreds or thousands of times before, but
you're seeing it with fresh eyes as if it's brand
(13:07):
new again. And that allows you to you know, to
take an innovative vantage point on what might be an
old problem and and that can sometimes lead to interesting ideas. Well.
That's that is kind of fascinating thought because we're sort
of dealing with the idea of feeling stuck in different
phases of your life. And it's really a lot of
(13:28):
it's about seeing your life differently, isn't it. And are
these moments? Can they just be things that strike you
out of the blue, like you wake up one morning
and you think, you know, hey, I should be doing
this not that. Yeah, absolutely, I think it does for
all of us. But I think that sometimes we don't
notice it because we're too focused on our goals and
you know, we we haven't opened up our peripheral vision
(13:49):
to even sort of catch those those perspectives as they
sneak their way in. Yeah, well that's where the procrastination
comes in. Handy right, allows it gives you the time
to reflect on I guess, on what you're doing. You
had some stories about procrastinators and originals that showed that
there was actually some advantage to not doing everything way
(14:10):
ahead of time. There can be Yeah, So Gysian and
I studied this in some companies and we also designed
some experiments, and we found that people who are moderate
procrastinators tend to be more creative than procrastinators or extreme procrastinators.
And at first it was it was hard to get
data on the procrastinators because they never showed up for
(14:31):
our studies. But you know, eventually, eventually we figured it out.
And what seems to be the case is that if
you're a procrastinator like me, you make the mistake of
rushing forward with your first idea, which is rarely your
best idea, and it's it's the one that came to
mind first, it was the most obvious. And if you're
an extreme procrastinator and you wait till the very last minute,
(14:53):
you have to rush forward with your easiest idea because
you don't have time to work through the you know,
the more creative or more complex. And so there's this
sweet spot you know that that Leonardo da Vinci seemed
to live in Steve Jobs, Martin Luther King Jr. Abraham Lincoln.
All of them were quick to start, but often slow
to finish. You know, they would they would dive into
(15:14):
a problem or question early and then say, all right,
wait a minute, but I don't wanna I don't want
to finish it now, just because I want to have
a sense of closure and completion. I want to keep
my mind open to incubating. And I think for a
lot of us, we feel like if we're taking our time,
we won't be first out of the gate, and then
we can't win. And you say, that's not the case
(15:35):
necessarily either. Well, the first mover advantage turns out mostly
to be a myth in in the world of companies
and businesses. So I think, you know, there are there
are times when you want to move first. So if
you're dealing with patents and technology, or if they're big
network effects, you know, like in social media, where the
more people join, the more valuable your you know, your
(15:56):
your network is, it can be useful to be first,
But in most other cases there's actually a first mover
disadvantage because the people who move first have to put
all their energy into creating the market, and then someone
else can just swoop in and make it better. It's
much easier to improve on someone else's idea than, you know,
than to create yours from scratch. Which is why I
(16:19):
think that, you know, very frequently it's not the pioneers,
it's more of the settlers who are able to come in.
You know. I think of like a Magna Vox who
you know, kind of helped invent video games, and then
Nintendo licensed their technology and then came up with a
much better version of it, and you know, it was
able to piggyback on all the work they had done
(16:41):
to open up that that domain. And you see this
happen over and over again, right. It's it's part of
the reason that the Google came in way after a
whole generation of search engines. And you know, I think
there's there's more to that than people often realize. So
you can be an original, but you don't necessarily have
to be your regeneral version. No, you don't have to
(17:03):
be first. You just have to be different and better, Okay,
and sometimes hanging back a little bit lets you know
how you're going to be different and better. That's interesting.
I think we we always talk about how the early
bird gets the worm, but no one ever mentions that
the early worm gets caught. Don't be the worm. I'm
(17:24):
going to sling something out at you because it really
surprised me. Um. It seems like you are down on gratitude,
like you the whole gratitude list thing, which I feel
like everyone in their brother tells you to turn to,
and for Heaven's sakes, you know, start and finish your
day with that moment of gratitude. Not your thing. Well,
(17:45):
it depends on where you try the line. So I
feel like my job as a social scientist is to
look at the evidence and figure out what works for
most of the people most of the time. And Sonya
Lubermerski has these interesting studies where she shows that it's
better to keep a gratitude list once a week than
once a day. It seems like if you do it daily,
(18:06):
it starts to get repetitive, and then you also run
out of meaningful things and and pretty soon you're like, wow,
I'm really grateful for you know, the paint that's on
my wall and it's dry. And if you do it weekly,
you know it stays fresh, and you're able to focus
maybe on on some more meaningful things that that you
truly do appreciate. And then I found in some of
(18:28):
my own work that gratitude can be a fleeting emotion.
So I did these studies with a colleague, Jane Dutton,
where we studied university fundraisers and we randomly assigned some
of them to keep gratitude journals and write about things
that they appreciate it at work, and there was no
effect whatsoever on their effort in the next few weeks.
(18:48):
They didn't make more calls, they didn't spend more time
on the phone, and it seemed to be the case
that you know, gratitude sort of put them in a
passive position, right, It's all about what you've received from others.
And we thought, how do we get how do we
get these these people to feel more active? And we said,
what if instead they kept a contribution journal, where, you know,
rather than reflecting on what they received from others, they
(19:10):
were journaling about what they gave to others and how
their actions made a difference. And the callers who kept
those journals actually spiked an effort by about fifty a week.
So you know when you wrote about what you'd contributed
to others, it reinforced, Hey, I make a difference. My
actions matter, other people value me, and then it's much
(19:31):
more likely that you're going to step up and and
try to help others when you have opportunities in the future.
And so you know, I think, I think there's value
in counting your blessings, but you should also count your contributions.
It sounds like good advice does, especially since those people
were asking other people for money. But I but I
(19:53):
get it. I mean, they were also probably saying to themselves,
I'm doing something for this cause, and the cause is
really important and got him going. I just want to
push back a little bit on the gratitude thing, just
because of something you said and a talk with that
you and Cheryl Senberg were giving words, Yes I am
that's what I don't do that. That's so cruel. I'm
(20:14):
not a hypocrite. Well, there was just a point where
you said where when she said, all right, I'm using
her words against your Is that more fair? Um? She
said that when she was in her deepest, darkest hole.
You said, it could be worse, So be appreciative for
what you know. Where you are, even though it's a
(20:34):
really dreadful place. And she said, what are you talking about?
You worse and said, well, you said that you're that
her husband could have been driving her kids when he
had his a rhythmia. So suddenly she said she was
so blessed and appreciative and grateful for the fact that
that wasn't the case, that it completely adjusted her outlook.
And that was sort of like when she was able
(20:56):
to crawl out of that hole and start rebuilding and
stopped feeling sorry for herself. And she says, she was
good after that. So taking stock of your blessings, I
think can help you with a change, right, Yeah, of course,
I But I wasn't suggesting that she journal about that
every day, right, and you know, constantly count the things
(21:18):
that she was grateful for. I do think, you know,
this might be a little different in the context of
you know, acute stress or a tragedy, where you know,
if if you're ruminating on, you know, on a horrible event,
and you know you're in Cheryl's case, she was just
thinking through all the things that she could have done
and felt she should have done to save her husband.
(21:40):
And you know, no matter how many times, her neurosurgeon
brother said to her, even the doctors didn't catch this,
there's no way you could have got this. She's still
in some way felt responsible. And so, you know, I
think the one of the lessons there is, you know,
if you're if you're stuck in ruminating about the past,
you shouldn't just compare the past to what could have
(22:01):
been better, you also should compare it to what could
have been worse. You know. It's a little bit like
in a much more mundane setting. I often see with
my students who who complain a lot about fomo, the
fear of missing out, which is one of those things
that apparently only millennials experience, you know, when when you
actually sit down and think about that, what what is fomo?
(22:23):
It's about assuming that you could be doing something else
that's better, but you also could be doing something else
that's worse. And so I love this term that Oliver
Brookman coined. He talks about joemo, which is the joy
of missing out and to give out how glad you
are that you're not doing all these boring things that
a lot of your friends are stuck doing. And so
(22:43):
the point is, if you know, if you're gonna engage
in what psychologists called counterfactual thinking, where you know, you
imagine the present or the past being different from what
it is or was. You should you should make the
upward and the downward comparisons the better and the worse. That. Yeah,
they can always imagine that they're in a working class
with a really boring professor instead of coal one with
(23:06):
the ted talk. I don't think anyone has ever called
me cool before. Okay, there you go, hanging on the wall.
I mean it obviously sounds like you were an incredible
ally to share all through through this awful period she
was going through. Um, you know, how do you find allies?
(23:29):
You talked, You talked about the importance of finding a posse,
people who can support you. How do you know who
to how to build that team or is it sometimes
not the people that you think you should have one
on that team? Yeah, you know, It's it's funny because
I've always gravitated towards people that in psychology we'd call agreeable.
(23:50):
So agreeableness is one of the major dimensions of personality.
And you know, you think of agreeable people as warm, friendly, polite, welcoming,
nice people, and disagreeable people are more critical, skeptical, and challenging.
They're also much more likely than their peers to go
to law school. That's another conversation. And you know, I
think that I've I've always had this inclination to to
(24:13):
reach out to and lean on agreeable people because I
know they'll be cheerleaders and you know they are in
those one on one conversations. But agreeable people love harmony,
and that means they tend to leave two big gaps.
One is that they're not very good at questioning you.
So you don't just need a support network, you also
(24:33):
need a challenge network, right, not not just people who
who kind of affirm everything that you're doing, but but
people who push you because they care about helping you improve.
And agreeable people are a little less likely to do
that because they don't like conflict. And then the other
thing is if you're if you're let's say you're making
a U turn in the sense that you know you've
quit your job and you're trying to start a business,
(24:54):
agreeable people are not great advocates for your ideas with
others because they don't want rock the boat and they
don't want to pitch an idea that somebody else might
not like. It's the disagreeable people who are you know,
willing to challenge you because they want to help you,
and who love fighting that uphill battle. And we'll stand
(25:15):
up for an idea that's unpopular or unproven, and you know,
if you can get them excited about it, they will
run through walls for you. And so I think that
we should all stop underestimating the value that disagreeable people
and really bring to our lives. It's fascinating because you know,
in these down moments when we're making transitions, You're right,
we seek comfort and um, some of those you know,
(25:38):
more abrasive types who you know give us the tough love,
aren't aren't the ones we rushed to. I think we
need both. Yeah, I think we need the support and
they push forward. Yeah. I mean, you know, in my
sort of job searching um post being hip checked out
of a job in an industry, I've found that sometimes
it's the people who are not in my close network,
(25:58):
but in my secondary or even ter share network who
have the most interesting ideas for me, and they don't
know me from Adam. Really, I mean, they're just kind
of you know, I get them to meet me for coffee,
and they talk to me for a little while, and
they throw things out and some of some of what
they throw out is very challenging. But it seems like
they're not as um attached to one idea of me
(26:19):
or to making me feel better. You know, they just
they just meet me for coffee. They may never see
me again. They'll just tell me, tell me what they think.
The important thing is the fact that they're givers. And
Adam talk about that, right, how do you tell if
someone that you're sitting down getting advice from why you're
having coffee is a giver or a taker? Well, I
was going to say that if your acquaintances are giving
(26:39):
you better advice than your friends you meet new friends, No,
I think that. I actually I want to talk about
why why that's not true? But oyay, So first, you know,
I've spent a lot of my career studying this give
or take her distinction on the extremes, where you know,
givers are the people who are are constantly trying to
figure out what they can do for you, whereas takers
(27:01):
are all about what can you do for me? M m.
That's that's interesting. We're even going to come back to
that after the break, because this giver taker thing is
very important. I also want to talk about self compassion.
We can do that too. Okay, great, and we are
(27:24):
back speaking with Adam Grant about givers and takers, givers
and takers and finding the right balance of those people
in your life. Go ahead on him, tell us, well, first,
let's let's just talk about the friend acquaintance thing for
a second, because I feel like it's it's an important
distinction that often gets overlooked. So you know, in sociology,
(27:46):
when you study weak ties and strong ties, you often
find that people get better advice from their weak ties
than their strong ties. And you know, there's people who
you know well and have built a lot of familiarity
and trust with. They tend to travel in the same circles,
and they know a lot of the same things that
you do, and so they give you redundant information, whereas
your week ties are much more likely to meet different people,
(28:09):
to know different things, and they give you more efficient
access to novel information, which is one of the reasons
why you're more likely to get a new job through
a week tie than a strong tie. For example, Um,
but I wouldn't have known to call them weak ties.
They're just you know, awkward people to try and meet
for coffee. But um, but actually those have turned out
(28:31):
to be some of the most interesting meetings. You're absolutely right,
and they pop with ideas in a way that you know,
my my close ties, UM don't necessarily always, so there's
a way to get that without the awkwardness. There's a
third kind of tie, which is called a dormant tie,
and those are the people that you used to know
but lost touch with in the last three, five, seven years.
(28:54):
What's great about dormant ties is it's way easier to
reconnect with someone you used to know than to start
a connection and from scratch with someone you hardly know.
But unlike your strong ties, your dormant ties have been
doing different things. They've been connecting with different people, and
so they have that access to different kinds of ideas
and insights that you normally get from a week tie.
(29:15):
And so, you know, one thought is it's worth reconnecting
with one dormant tie every month, and you don't You
don't have to do it strategically or instrumentally. In fact,
there's some research led by Daniel Levin which shows that
people are horrible at predicting which of their dormant ties
are going to be helpful, because by definition, you don't
know what they know. And so you know, it's just
best to say, hey, who are the people that i'd
(29:36):
love to to get back in touch with. And there's
some studies where executives have been assigned to do this
and they grown and they say, but those ties are
dormant for a reason. And it turns out that most
ties are not dormant for a reason. We got busy,
we move, we changed jobs. We did not mean to
fall out of touch. And I think that we we
don't do as much to to reconnect as we should.
(29:58):
So we should go to our high school reunions. That
what you're saying. No, No, that's why we have social media.
You can skip the reunion, just find them on linked
In or Facebook. Thank you God, thank you, you know,
thank you Adam for giving me that permission because my
is coming up. I mean, talk talk about disruption, right,
Reunions are irrelevant? Now, Yeah, that they're absolutely true, except
(30:19):
that you know what, there's something about the serendipity of
running into running into someone that you didn't necessarily want
to run into that and and that can be really positive.
And because if I'm just scrolling to Facebook nope, nope, nope, nope,
nope and get to the end of my class, is like, no,
I'm not going to the reunion. But then if you're there,
you're kind of forced to talk to them and it
(30:40):
could be a beautiful thing. Yeah, yeah, I think that's right.
And you know, one of the things you discover actually
is you when you when you try to reconnect with people,
whether it's at a reunion or whether you're reaching out,
you you learned pretty quickly whether you've been more of
a giver taker, Right, So if if you've built up
a history of general people are thrilled to hear from you,
(31:02):
whereas if you've been selfish, they want to lock the
door to their network and throw away the key. You
can you never get in. Yeah, yeah, I mean in
that sense, what goes around comes around. But you know,
it is an interesting test, right of not not necessarily
whether you know you are a giver or a taker,
but you know, in that relationship and that interaction in
the past, how have you been perceived? So when you're
(31:24):
meeting with all these dormant ties and they're generating tons
of good ideas for you, Um, how do you know
which ideas to pursue? I mean, are you going to
become an aerial pilot or so? Don't you have away?
You talk about originals and and just the plethora of
ideas is not being a negative because I can see
(31:44):
that it would be a little bit. Uh, you know,
it can put you on stop when you're surrounded by
too many ideas too, because you could be bad at them. Yeah,
you know, I think the good news on this is
that original thinkers have more bad ideas their peers. And
I mean, the more horrible ideas you have, the more
(32:05):
creative you are. But there's actually there's a lot of
evidence for that, and you know, we see it amongst
scientists and musicians and inventors and artists, and it seems
to be that just highly original people have lots of ideas,
and when you're generating an idea, you're in an open
sort of creative mode, which is very different from what
(32:25):
you need to do to evaluate an idea, which is
kind of a different phase of you know, being more skeptical,
more discerning, more critical. And so you know, I think
in a lot of cases we're just bad at judging
our own ideas. I have a former student, Justin Berg,
who's now a Stanford professor, and Justin showed in some
research that if you have a list of twenty ideas
you came up with, you should rank them from favorite
(32:48):
to least favorite, and then your most promising idea is
not the one you rank first, it's the one you
rank second most often. Wow, that's fascinating because we were
a little blinder to our own ideas. Huh, exactly, And
that number two idea you have a little more distance,
You're able to see it with more objectivity, but you
also have enough passion, you know, to not only recognize
(33:10):
the flaws, but try to fix them. And so I'm
always a little worried when I think about this research
because people will just try to game the system and say, wait,
so if I take my favorite idea and I rank
it second, I'm good, No, don't do that. Well. I
find that I am absolutely full of ideas, um, but
I also get very self critical when I get overwhelmed
(33:34):
and I'm not falling up on them in the way
I think I should. You know, the flaming hoops that
I mentioned earlier, and one of the things you you
talk about is self compassion and having um, having that
for yourself. Moments where I guess, I hope I'm I
hope I'm getting this right, Moments where you just you know,
you give yourself some slack. Sometimes though I get nervous
(33:56):
that I have too much of that, there might be
too much slack. UM, how do you you know, how
do you find the balance between stagnation and um and
also just giving yourself some room. So here's what's interesting
this is this is Kristin Neft's work. She's a psychologist
who put self compassion on the map. She shows is
(34:16):
that self compassion is not about letting yourself off the hook,
and so slack might be the wrong way to think
about it. It's more about showing yourself the kindness and
understanding that you would give to a good friend who
was struggling in the way that you might be in
that whatever situation you're in. And so one of the
ways that that you're supposed to develop self compassion is
(34:37):
you think about a failure or a challenge or an
embarrassing experience you've had, and you write a letter to
yourself as if you were writing to a good friend
and give them the kind of encouragement and understanding that
you would normally show. That that doesn't mean you don't
take responsibility right. You wouldn't say to a friend, oh,
it's totally not your fault that you know that you
failed because you were unprepared. You would say, you know,
(35:00):
I see that this happened, but you know this happens
to everyone, and I know you'll do better next time,
and you might even give some tips on how to
do that. And so I think that same kindness can
be turned inward. And that's what self compassion is all about.
So is that sort of what you showed yourself when
you got all those negative reviews from from the students
you subjected to your terrible, terrible lecturing at the beginning.
(35:21):
Did you just was it partly like saying, look, there's
some good stuff in here and I'll get better as
I go along, and or were you not so good
at that then? You know? I I think it's always
a tight rope walk. I think what what I was
worst at in in that moment was was doing what
I probably would have benefited the most from, which was
(35:42):
just sitting down and watching myself on tape and being
able to see exactly what the students were seeing, and
I think I just would have processed it a lot
more quickly. But I think what would ended up working
for me was I started working with a teaching coach
and she videotape me, and I couldn't I couldn't bring
(36:03):
myself to watch it at the time. I've I've gotten
there finally, but she, you know, she would actually watch
the videos and then point out things that she saw
his patterns when she was watching me live. And you
know that that helped me just figure out. I realized
a big chunk of my anxiety came from sort of
not knowing what the right pacing was for an audience,
and you know, not knowing when I should stop and
(36:24):
make a joke and when I should pause and give
the audience a chance to reflect. And you know, what
what should my hands be doing when I'm giving his speech? No,
no one, no one ever knows. But I think that
you know, a lot of a lot of that was
was saying, Look, you know, I'm I'm not going to
be excellent at this today, but I believe this is
(36:48):
something I can do better tomorrow. So so you just
just go back to a little detail here. So she
watched the tapes and then give you feedback so that
you didn't have to or did you No, that's what
That's what ended up happening. Watch you like hid in
a corner while she watched them. That's kind of amazing.
It kind of reminds me of something I read a
(37:11):
piece in The Times recently. Um. It was it was
kind of casual, There wasn't much much data, wasn't wasn't
really driven by data, But it was this observation that
sometimes there's one huge thing that's holding us back and
you just need somebody to point out what your big
thing is. But your big problem is and maybe maybe
you don't have one, but a lot of us do.
They've got a we've got a big thing and we're
(37:32):
totally blund to it. Um. I mean, is it an
important thing, particularly when you're going through a difficult transition,
you need that guidance to to find someone will be
honest enough or or is that just like asking for brutality? Well,
I don't know. You know, I think a lot of
it depends on your personality and the culture that you're in.
(37:54):
I will say though, that you know Ultimately, the people
who I know who not only achieved the most but
also learn the most are the ones who are less
concerned with protecting their images and their egos and more
concerned with trying to attain mastery. And so, you know,
and there's there's a lot of research on this right
that if you're if you're always trying to avoid looking
(38:15):
bad or prove yourself to other people, that you don't
take the same kinds of risks and pursue the same
kinds of challenges that you do if master is your goal.
And so I think that, you know, at some level,
I would love to see more people say, yeah, you
know what, criticism sometimes hurts. I'm not always going to
enjoy hearing it, but I should crave it because that's
(38:39):
the only way I'm ever going to get better and
reach my potential. So, just before we wrap up, I
want to ask you one more question about another U
turn you've taken lately. You have kindly come on our podcast,
but you also have a podcast, which I think is
a fairly recent endeavor. Um, what what are you seeking
(39:00):
to to achieve? Is like building resilience through the digital stratosphere?
What what's this new adventure for you on podcasts. Well,
it's a few things. One, it's trying to reach people
who don't read books or seemed to read at all. Uh,
that that was that was part of the aspiration. Two,
(39:23):
I think that you know, I've spent the past five
years going into workplaces and you know, mostly I guess
sharing things that I've already know, and I wanted to
go out in the world and learn again, and I
thought a podcast was a great opportunity to do that
and then share the insights and the haws on the
back end. And then the third thing is I just
(39:44):
think it's a travesty that the majority of people spend
the majority of their waking hours at work, and so
many of us work in jobs that we don't find
meaningful and motivating. And I don't think we should tolerate that.
So I guess, you know, in some ways, work life
is about trying to if it's not just about making
work suck less, it's also about trying to make work
more meaningful and motivating. Well, we're so happy you're doing that,
(40:07):
thank you. Yes, I mean, honestly, I feel like I
learned so much from that podcast and I'm loving it.
And we will be listening UM for for our listeners
who I know also read books. UM. If you want
to follow Adam Grant, find him at Adam Grant Adam M.
Grant on Twitter and listen to this great new podcast,
(40:28):
to Work Life with Adam Grant, which is a TED production.
We are so thankful, UM, particularly since I've heard on
your podcast I free to talk about the importance of
saying no to things to keep work from taking over
your life. So you said yes to us and we
are so appreciative. Thank you Adam, well, thank you Lisa,
Thank you Jail. It was a delight to be here.
(40:50):
So let us know what you were facing right now.
Reach out to us on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram at
you Turns Podcasts. Thanks so much, See you next.
Road to Somewhere News
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Lisa Oz
Jill Herzig
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