Adam Grant ON: Why Discomfort is the Key to Growth and Strategies for Unlocking Your Hidden Potential

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
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Speaker 2 (01:27):
I think envy is the thief of joy. Where we
run into problems is when we stop admiring those people
and we start wanting what they have or feeling like
I should have gotten what they've got. Organizational psychologists want
to bring in best selling author and Wharton's number one
professor Adam Grant. I think that's people saying I'm stuck.
I feel like my life isn't going anywhere. I feel
like I'm squandering my potential. That's a travesty. Growth is

(01:50):
part of how you feel like you're using your time well.
The person you're competing with is your past self, and
the bar you're raising is for your future self.

Speaker 1 (01:57):
Before we jump into this episode, I'd like to invite
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(02:17):
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Speaker 2 (02:19):
The best sell I'm hot during Post the number one
health and wellness podcast and Purpose with Jay Shetty.

Speaker 1 (02:26):
Hey everyone, welcome back to On Purpose, the number one
health podcast in the world. Thanks to each and every
one of you that come back every week to listen, learn,
and grow. Now you know that this podcast is all
about how we can do better individually collectively grow with
new ideas, new insights, how we can develop new habits,
challenge our mindsets, and extend our capacity for goodness and

(02:49):
greatness in our lives. And today's guest is truly an
expert and someone who's deeply obsessed and studied about these
themes and subjects for a long long time, someone I
love having on the show. I'm so grateful that he's
returning on the show today. I'm talking about the one
and only Adam Grant, an organizational psychologist at Wharton, where
Adam has been the top rated professor for seven straight years.

(03:11):
Adam's books have sold millions of copies, and Adam's TED
talks have been viewed more than thirty million times, and
he hosts the hit podcast Rethinking. Adam's pioneering research on
motivation and meaning has enabled people to reach their aspirations
and exceed others expectations, and his new book is called
Hidden Potential, The Science of Achieving Greater Things. I highly

(03:35):
recommend you grab a copy of this book. This is
what we're diving into today. So if you love this conversation,
you'll love the book because it will go so much deeper.
Check it out. Adam, thank you so much for joining me.

Speaker 2 (03:45):
Wow, thanks for that, Jay. I feel like I should
just leave now.

Speaker 1 (03:47):
Leave now.

Speaker 2 (03:48):
This is it going to peak right there.

Speaker 1 (03:51):
Honestly, though I was saying it to you, it's so
nice to meet you in person because I've admired your work.
I've read your books, We've had an interview before. You've
been so collaborative on offline about different things that come up,
ideas projects, and I really appreciate that because you know,
it's we're all busy, we're all got a million things
going on, and you find a way to be personal
and present even in those So thank you so much,

(04:13):
I appreciate it.

Speaker 2 (04:14):
I wish I could say it was on purpose, but
it's an accident.

Speaker 1 (04:17):
And I want to I mentioned this offline. I'm gonna
say it again, like your books called hidden potential. But
I remember on our last conversation, I was kind of saying,
you know, I'd love to one day, like you know,
study something deeply, potentially do a master's or a PhD,
or you know, I love the idea of obsessing over
something for a long period of time. And you kind of,
as you just said in your words, well, I'll let

(04:38):
you say it. You encouraged me, and I was like,
what if Adam believes I could do something like this,
maybe I can. So you were tapping into my hidden
potential years before this book came out.

Speaker 2 (04:48):
It was only hidden to you. First of all, there's
no way that studying behavioral economics or neuroscience or psychology
or any of the topics that interest you is anywhere
near as hard as becoming a monk. That was just
the beginning. But I think you might have you suggested
that I was planning a seed, like the seed was
already growing, it just needed a little bit of extra
water in sunlight. But I'm still waiting.

Speaker 1 (05:12):
You're waiting, you're waiting.

Speaker 2 (05:13):
No, it'll happen.

Speaker 1 (05:14):
It will happen, It will happen. I want to talk
about so you know. The subtitle of the book is
the Science of Achieving Greater Things, and it's all about
getting better at getting better? Why is getting better important?
Like why is growth important? And I know it sounds
it may sound like a stupid question, It may sound
like a silly thing to talk about, especially on a

(05:35):
show like this, but I find that people I talk
to sometimes idolize being average. They think it's good enough,
Good enough is good. I find that we are wired
often to want things to stay exactly the same. We
like how they are. Why should we get better? Why
should anything get better? We should be satisfied with what
we have, And often in the guise of contentment and peace,

(06:00):
there's a sense of lethargy and complacency that, well, we
don't need to grow, because you're just being greedy. So
I'm presenting a spectrum of ideas there. I'm happy for
you to dive into any of those. But why does
getting better and improving matter at all?

Speaker 2 (06:14):
This is fascinating. Nobody's ever asked me that before. And frankly,
I think I've taken for granted that growth is just
intrinsically enjoyable and motivating. I mean, I think you made
a case that maybe some people are not motivated by growth.
I think that where I might push back on that
is to say, we live in a world that glorifies performance.
So you know, people feel like if they want to

(06:35):
be respected or celebrated, they need to win a metal,
they need to earn a trophy, they need to get
an A plus. And I think what we've lost sight
of is that what people actually enjoy is a sense
of progress, feeling like they have forward momentum. When I
think about what does it look like to not grow,
I don't think for most people that's good enough. I

(06:57):
think that's stagnation. I think that's people's saying I'm stuck.
I feel like my life isn't going anywhere. I feel
like I'm squandering my potential, and I just I think
that's a travesty. And so I think growth is part
of how you feel like you're using your time.

Speaker 1 (07:12):
Well, absolutely, I completely agree with you, and I'm glad
no one's ever asked you that before, because I think
I'm like that too. I kind of take for granted
that I love growth and I love the idea of
being better and improving. And I can't remember. I mean,
it's been said a million times. It's like an age
old quote, but it goes you know, if you're not growing,
you're dying. And I think that's the point that we

(07:33):
are either moving forward or we're moving backward. We're either
getting faster and smarter or we're getting slower and not smarter.
And I think when you recognize that idea that there
is no staying the same, there is no we're just
going to stay on this place and platform forever. You
start recognizing, oh, I have to move forward and the
pace at which I move. How have you guided people

(07:53):
with that? I find like often we compare our pace
of growth and our pace of becoming better. And that's
the hardest one because you're like, well, they got that
body in three months, or you know, you've been the
top grade professor for seven years, like I've only won
that once, or whatever it may be. Pace of growth?
How have you thought about pace of growth in your
work for a long time?

Speaker 2 (08:14):
I believe the saying the mantra that comparison is the
thief of joy. I don't believe it anymore. I think
envy is the thief of joy. I think social comparison
is invaluable. I think we have to look to other
people for inspiration. I think we look to other people
for learning, you know, not just what am I capable of,
but also how do I get there. I think where

(08:37):
we run into problems is when we stop admiring those
people and we start wanting what they have or feeling
like I should have gotten what they got. And I
think there what's probably helpful is to make a different
set of comparisons. You know. Part of what you could
do is not think so much about pace as starting.
Maybe focus more on starting points. So maybe somebody who's
growing faster than you actually just art with more advantages

(09:01):
than you did and you've traveled a greater distance. I
don't think we pay enough attention to that would be
one thought. I think, obviously comparing to ourselves is helpful too,
And I think that you know so often when it
comes to benchmarking progress, I want to tell people, Okay,
the person you're competing with is your past self, and
the bar you're raising is for your future self. And

(09:22):
if you can focus on that, it's a little bit
easier to realize. All right, Yeah, everybody has a different
starting point, everybody has a different pace. But if I
could tell actually, let me say this. I think so
many people let their expectations rise with their progress, and
so you set a goal today, you achieve it in

(09:43):
six months, and then by the time it happens, it's
almost a relief. I didn't blow it. Definitely, there's no joy,
there's no sense of meaning and purpose. You sort of
expected it and you would have been disappointed if it
didn't happen. I think the way you have that is
you get in touch with your past self and you say,

(10:03):
if you know, if six months ago me or five
years ago me knew where I would land now, how
proud would I have been? How excited would I have been?
And if you keep that past self in mind, it's
much easier to appreciate the I guess the strides that
you're making.

Speaker 1 (10:17):
I love that distinction you made as well, between how
comparison versus envy is the thief of joy. I think
it's so subtle, but it's so nuanced and so powerful
because you're so right that I always think of it
in the same way that you either study someone or
you envy them, And often the deeper you study someone,
the less you'll envy them because you actually realize how

(10:38):
far they've come and what they had to get through
and challenges they had, and you start getting the energy
from that study to say, oh, maybe I have that
within me too, and maybe I can find that within
me too, because I have challenges I think for me.

Speaker 2 (10:51):
A really concrete example of that was I I was
terrified of public speaking when I decided to become a professor,
like maybe it was the wrong profession, like what are
you doing here? But I remember even being a student
and thinking about raising my hand in college and I
would start to physically shake, and by the time I
got called on sometimes I would like I would forget

(11:11):
what I was going to say, or I'd second guess it,
or I'd stumble and stammer my way through it. And
so the idea that I was now going to stand
in front of a whole classroom or on a big
stage was extremely a daunting. So what did I do.
I went to speakers that I really admired and started
studying them, thinking this is going to help me. And
the first one I picked was MLK great, big, really yeah,

(11:35):
I mean, what a great way to get tomorrow les.
So I watched his dream speech. I tried to take
notes on, you know, on things I could learn from him,
you know, I wanted to know, well, how did he
get there? And so I start reading about it. He's
thirty four years old. When he gives that speech, I
might as well quit. I cannot believe the greatest speech
in American history, you know, done by somebody who's you know,

(11:56):
not even close to his prime. And I think if
i'd stop there, I would have quit, and it would
have been easy to walk away from MLK as just
an impossible role model. And let's be clear, he is
an impossible role model. I will never I could work
on public speaking for an infinite number of years, every
minute of every day, and never come close to that.
What was helpful, though, was then sort of rewinding and

(12:19):
realizing we usually see our role models at their peak,
and we don't have the starting point, we don't have
the distance they've traveled. So how did MLK get here?
And turns out he started entering public speaking competitions when
he was fifteen years old. That was two decades of practice.
The year he did his dream speech, he gave over
three hundred and fifty talks, and so you know, if

(12:40):
you think about the cumulative progress that was made, that's
multiple lifetimes, you know, of effort. So I think that's
that's the kind of sort of analysis that we need
to do, and I don't think most of us do that.

Speaker 1 (12:51):
Yeah, absolutely absolutely. I can't believe. I can't remember exactly
what it was I left to find it, but it
was I think it was Usain Bolt who said something
like I've worked for X amount of hours to run
ten seconds or something like that, right, like the idea
of he's practiced for all these hours or months or
years to run something and however long he did it.
And I forgot the exact number. But it's so interesting

(13:14):
what you're saying, and that backstory of that journey, that growth,
the skills development, the hours, the struggle, three hundred that
year alone is pretty you know, it's Yeah, that's insane,
and I think it's fascinating you talk about this. I mean,
I want to. I want to read from the book
a bit if you don't mind. So there are a
couple of things that I picked out. So this is
page twenty six for anyone who's listening or watching right now,

(13:36):
page twenty six of Hidden Potential. So character cannot be
developed in ease and quiet. Only through experiences of trial
and suffering can the soul be strengthened, vision cleared, ambition inspired,
and success achieved, according Helen Keller, and then you go
on to say that summoning the nerve to face discomfort

(13:57):
is a character skill. The way you were writing this
book was so empowering because it was almost like you
were pulling from you know, I know, of course everything's
highly researched, everything's back toward science, but you were kind
of pulling from a bit of a mind Luther King's
face there, like the language in there of like summoning
the nerve to face discomfort is a character's skill. And

(14:18):
so you're actually saying what we just talked about with them, Okay,
that doing hard things, doing uncomfortable things, doing difficult things
is actually where so much of this ability fit impotential
comes from. But all of us shy away from it.
You know, all of us don't want to do it.
We're scared of it. You becoming a professor, that's scary.
If you don't like public speaking. We avoid discomfort, we

(14:40):
avoid awkwardness, we avoid challenges. How do we summon the
nerve to face discomfort?

Speaker 2 (14:47):
Well, clearly what I did was I started by thinking, Okay,
writing this book is going to be uncomfortable. There are
going to be a lot of times when I'm going
to get stuck, when I'm going to feel like this
chapter is not working, and then my writing is not working,
and then I'm not capable of being a writer. Why
did I ever think I could become a writer? And
then that just spirals out of control. And then the
antidote to that is to think, you know what, Jay

(15:08):
Shetty needs to be empowered. And also, I love this
image of you getting empowerment.

Speaker 1 (15:13):
I do get empowered.

Speaker 2 (15:14):
I would never think of you as somebody who is
in need of that. You're out empowering lots of other
people always in need. I guess for me. One of
the things I learned from the research that I didn't
know before. I think I always understood intuitively and the
idea that discomfort is key to growth. What I didn't
understand was that actively seeking discomfort and even amplifying it

(15:34):
was one of the ways that you could move toward
your idea of progress. I kind of saw it as
a necessary evil, something that happens, you know, when you're
learning and you're struggling, and you're tinkering with new skills
and with the I think what the evidence shows is
that people who are actually given the goal to intentionally
feel uncomfortable. This is done in some cases asking people
to go on stage to do improv comedy and literally

(15:57):
feel awkward on purpose. They end up growing more from
that experience because they put themselves in situations that challenged them.
And so I think that's what I had to do
with public speaking. When I was starting to teach, is
therapists talk about exposure therapy and they often recommend systematic
desensitization to say, all right, let's start, you know, little seminar,
and then you get to know a group of students well,

(16:17):
and then you can kind of build from there. I
didn't have time for that, so I went to the
opposite extreme of flooding and said, all right, I'm just
going to volunteer to give guest lectures in front of
huge classrooms of hundreds of students who I've never met before.
For my friends classes. I don't know why they let
me in. I don't why I volunteered. Yeah, they were

(16:37):
overly good friends. Maybe they were sacrificing the whole class
for my growth, but extremely uncomfortable for me. And I remember,
you know, just walking in and feeling like I do
not belong here, I'm not qualified. It was a massive
case of imposter syndrome. But I think one of the
things that happened when I put myself in that uncomfortable

(16:57):
situation is I realized it's not really going to go
worse than it did today. And reading through the you know,
the comments, there were lots of suggestions for improvement and
lots of criticisms, but there were also you know, little
compliments about things people liked. I was like, okay, I
can build on that. I can work on this. And
I think, you know, just coming in with the goal, yeah,

(17:18):
I should put myself in a deliberately uncomfortable situation. It
opened me to a much steeper learning curve than if
i'd done the kind of let me dip my toe
in the shallow end and then sort of take off
the floaties and learn to swim one step at a time.

Speaker 1 (17:33):
Yeah, and I feel it's really interesting, right, do you
think there are those two approaches? Like do you think
from the research you've done and even your own personal experience,
do you feel like it is either raw like sometimes
you just jump in the deep end and sometimes you
should kind of dip your toe in and then walk in.
Or do you think it's it's either raw like or
is wisdom knowing which one to try?

Speaker 2 (17:51):
When that's where I was, I was going to land.
I haven't seen a good comparison to the two and
when you should do each, But that's that's my intuition
as well as I think there's a time and a
place for both approaches, and probably most of the time
we want to be somewhere in the middle. But to
the point that you made earlier, I think most of
us aer too far in the side of avoiding discomfort,
and so we make these very small incremental steps, and

(18:13):
one it feels like we're not making progress, which is frustrating,
and then two we often then don't take enough risks
or try enough experiments to really stretch ourselves and move
up to the next level.

Speaker 1 (18:24):
Yeah, definitely, one of the things I find that I
always do if I get curious about something, it could
be a sport, it could be a subject, it could
be a topic, whatever it may be. I'll kind of
cancel everything on the weekend and just obsess about it
for a weekend. Oh, in because it gives me a
sense of momentum or growth or a sense of yeah,
that's not my thing, and I can very quickly decide

(18:45):
whether to invest more time in it. Whereas if I
was to have booked a six week course or a
program on something, I may find by week three that
this isn't something I want to study for six weeks,
as opposed to I could have figured that out in
twenty four hours if I just really obsessed about it,
or if I'll play a sport and I'm thinking, oh,
I like this sport, should I play it more? Let
me play it for a whole weekend. Every hour of

(19:06):
that I'm awake and see whether it fulfills me or
whether it's draining and tiring. And I feel like that's
kind of what you're saying works is a better experiment.

Speaker 2 (19:15):
Yeah, I think that kind of immersion is a really
efficient way to figure out is this an area that
I wanted to try to keep growing in. I think
the one thing i'd want to be careful about there
is There's there's some evidence to suggest that oftentimes we
only like things when we become good at them.

Speaker 1 (19:31):
That's true.

Speaker 2 (19:32):
If you spend a weekend on a skill that you're
terrible at, you might quit it prematurely because you just
haven't built up enough competence to start. I'm just gonna
say that, like the day I spent I spent swinging
a golf club, I've never felt so incapable in my life.

Speaker 1 (19:45):
Same.

Speaker 2 (19:46):
Also, golf is not a real sport, so I had
no problems.

Speaker 1 (19:49):
Watching explain that explain.

Speaker 2 (19:51):
I think I'll offend too many people.

Speaker 1 (19:53):
I think so true.

Speaker 2 (19:55):
No, but I think sometimes you do have to say,
all right, this could take me a couple of weeks
or couple months where you know, I build enough competence
to really experience the joy of it, like I've seen
this with I actually went through this with tennis. I
think I took tennis lessons when you know, when I
was four or five and I really disliked it, and
you know, ended up convincing my mom that I should quit.

(20:16):
And then when I picked it up again around eleven
or twelve, I had better hand eye coordination. I'd played
a bunch of ping pong, and now it was decent
enough at a racket sport. The tennis was actually fine,
And I think that's probably relevant to many skills.

Speaker 1 (20:28):
Absolutely, absolutely so. People always ask me, and I'm sure
you get asked this question a million times, of course
you do. You have your own book club too, which
you've been kindly featured me in the past, and people
who's asked me what should I read? And my number
one response to that is, well, what are you struggling with?
Because I read for what I'm struggling with. That's how
I choose. I always say to people, you don't go
to the grocery store because your refrigerator is full of milk.

(20:51):
You go when you're out of milk, or you're out
of cheese, or you're out of bread, and you go
and stock up. And so I'll often do an audit
of my internal unit and go, well, what am I
feeling like I don't have? And I've talked about how
a couple of years ago I was building my team
and I realized that being a leader and a recruiter
of very different skills and recruitment wasn't a strength that

(21:13):
I possessed. And I almost assumed that because I was
good at certain things that I should be good at recruiting,
and I wasn't. And I studied Daniel Coyle's book The
Culture Code, which I love. Yeah, it's fantastic. And I
interviewed him on the show too, and looked at his
playbook and everything else, and that one book in and
of itself made me better at recruitment. And so I
always look at it that way. But how do people

(21:34):
figure out what they're struggling with or what they're not
good at what they need to get better at. It's
probably the right way to put it, because we have
so many things we're not good at. Yeah, what do
we know what we need to get better at?

Speaker 2 (21:42):
This should have been a chapter and hit him potential.
Where were you, Jay Shenny Well? I was read in
this book that would have been really helpful. Maybe it'll
go in the paperback. I think my first thought is
I always want to look to my achilles heel. What's
the one thing that's holding me back from a goal
that I care about or a value that I'm trying
to to And then the other is, what's an area

(22:02):
of passion or curiosity that I'm excited to spend more
time investing in And sometimes that's for me because I'm
excited about it. Other times it's because I want to
help somebody else. And I think those are reasonable questions
to ask. I think where a lot of people struggle
is they know the domain already, right, so they've decided
I want to be a better entrepreneur, or I want

(22:23):
to be a better artist, or I'm interested in improving
my coding skills, right, and they've kind of already figured
out what part of life they're trying to improve that,
but then they don't know what to focus on from there.
I think the mistake that a lot of us make
is we end up asking the people around us that
we trust for feedback, which is a perfectly reasonable thing
to do, except when you ask for feedback, you get

(22:44):
a lot of cheerleaders and critics. The cheerleaders are basically
applauding your best self, and the critics are attacking your
worst self, and the critics leave you often demoralized, and
the cheerleaders can make you complacent what you want As
a coach, A good coach is somebody who sees your
potential and then helps you become a better version of yourself.

(23:04):
And so one of the things I learned through doing
research for the book is that instead of asking for feedback,
it's often better to seek advice. So feedback leads people
to think about what you did right or wrong yesterday.
Advice helps people focus on what you can do better tomorrow.
So the way I would like to I guess that
I apply this personally is when I'm trying to figure
out where I need to grow. Every time I get
off stage, for example, or every time I finish a

(23:26):
podcast interview, I will ask the audience or the host,
what's the one thing I can do better? Wow, which
is enormously helpful because they start to give concrete suggestions,
But I'm not immediately going to focus on the first
thing that I hear. What I do is I ask
a bunch of different people, and then I look for
the patterns. And I think that what too many people
do is even if they get to the point of

(23:46):
asking for advice rather than feedback, they start to hear
all these things they need to work on. They're like, WHOA,
this is overload. It's too much. I can't handle anymore.
I can probably only improve one or two things at
a time. What I would say to those people is,
I feel a little bit overwhelmed by the number of
suggestions are getting. You should actually seek more of them
because that will help you find the signal in the noise.

(24:06):
That will help you sort of figure out what one
person's idiosyncratic taste and what is a bunch of people's
you know, quality input. So I guess that's my favorite
way to figure out where you need to grow. Ask
a bunch of people for advice and then focus on
the common themes.

Speaker 1 (24:23):
Yeah, the patterns. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
I'm going to start doing that. I'm going to try
that out, Actually try it.

Speaker 2 (24:28):
You're on risk.

Speaker 1 (24:28):
Yeah, I'm not practiced in that way. And I like
that again, distinction between advice and feedback. And you're so right.
If someone asks me for feedback, your spot on my
mind goes into right and wrong and you know, weaknesses
and strengths as opposed to reflecting on hey this could
work really well, or I love this style you have

(24:49):
and it could work, you know. I think that's such
a great way to think about it. And it's hard too,
because we do base so much of where we want
to grow on what other people think we need to grow,
and I wonder how we can get better at sitting
with ourselves and reflecting on our days. I always loved
that statement from Steve Jobs where he said that every

(25:10):
couple of days I would look in the mirror and
ask myself or reflect on if this was the life
I wanted to live? Am I doing with my day
what I'd want to do? And if it wasn't, then
I knew I'd needed to make a change. And that
self evaluation, I think is such an important need because
at the same time as listening to others, you need both.
It's not an either or how have you done the

(25:30):
self evaluation part as well, from going to someone who
was scared of giving talks to being one of Ted's
most prolific popular speakers of all time to obviously now
you know traveling, book tours, events, everything else. How do
you self evaluate now as you were then?

Speaker 2 (25:46):
That's definitely been an evolution over the years. I think
probably the most helpful thing that I learned came from
another area where I struggled a lot earlier, and probably
based on my initial lack of talent, should have quit,
which was which was springboard diving.

Speaker 1 (26:01):
So springboard diving. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (26:04):
I basically ended up diving because I didn't make the
middle school basketball team or the high school soccer team.
And I saw a lifeguard diving at a pool one
day and it was just mesmerize. I want to learn
how to do that. Unfortunately I walked like Frankenstein. I
couldn't touch my toes without bending my knees. I could
hardly jump, very little explosive power or grace. Not cut

(26:25):
out to be a diver. I was really fortunate to
have a coach who saw more potential in me than
I saw in myself and said to me on day one,
I will never cut a diver who wants to be here.
And you know I'll put in as much as you
want and as much as you put in. And one
of the things I really struggled with was knowing when
a dive was good and when it was improving. I

(26:46):
felt like I needed to always aim for perfect tens.
And Eric Best, my coach, one day, sat me down
and he said, you know, there's no such thing as
a perfect ten. Wait, have the Olympic announcers been lying
to me? What do you mean? The whole point is
a ten is perfection. That's the appeal of this sport.
And he's like, nope, if you look at the rulebook,
a tennis for excellence, So even a dive that gets

(27:08):
a quote unquote perfect score is flawed. So then what
we started doing was we set targets for each dive
and he said, Okay, you know basic dive like a
back dive, We're going to aim for sixes and I
think that's within your range right now, and then we
would level that up over time as I started to
learn harder dives. I remember when I was doing a
two and a half summersault with a full twist, like,

(27:31):
let's just make the dive. You don't fail it. If
you don't do it for zeros, that'll count. And then
you know we're aiming for fours and so we have
dive specific goals. What I've done with that sort of
post diving career is realize I never had somebody like
this in my life. I need a judge, not just
a coach. So what I will do is I'll ask
people give me a zero to ten, how did that go?

(27:53):
And it's very rare for people to stay ten. Yeah,
of course, ye, So then you know whatever they say,
whether they give me a three, half or a six,
I just want to know how can I get closer
to ten. That's where I'm really trying to use other
people's reactions as a mirror. From there, I'll ask for suggestions,
But to your point, I need to make sure I'm
also proud of my own progress and I'm focusing on

(28:15):
my own principles. And so the last analysis that I do,
after I get the judges' ratings and the advice from
anybody who's willing to coach me, is to say, Okay,
let me go back to the version of me that
set this goal in the first place. Would that version
of me be proud? And if the answer is no,
I don't care what score I got, Yeah, how do
you navigate this?

Speaker 1 (28:35):
I'd say that I've definitely got it wrong before as well,
like I've definitely made mistakes in that where I think
when I first started out, I kind of kept things
very secret and I kept things very quiet. So I
had started working on creating some content online and for

(28:56):
everyone who doesn't know, I had been making content offline
for ten years before that, speaking to small groups of
five to ten people colleges, after school clubs, universities things
like that. And my parents forced me to go to
public speaking in drama school when I was eleven years old.
So I started learning public speaking because I was a
shy kid. I have a very similar public speaking story

(29:16):
to you when I was eleven years old. So I
wasn't born with a skill. It was something that was
harnessed and developed, except for the accent. Except for the
accent which I was born with. Yes, I can't do
anything about that. And funnily enough, and I always like
to clarify this. When I see Ted speakers with American accents,
I prefer it. Oh yes, because to me, no, going
from an authority in America from like you know, Warton

(29:38):
or Harvard or you know, No, it has magic. No,
this is like I'm.

Speaker 2 (29:43):
Wanting the Beatles to sing with American accents. No, that's different,
it's terrible. No. No, your British people always sound smarter.
We know this, Scot.

Speaker 1 (29:50):
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(30:35):
I developed a skill that I didn't know what I
had used for when I met the monks and studied
the Geeta and Eastern Wisdom, I was like, oh wow,
I have a skill set that was ready to be
used for this when I'd never used it. I never
used public speaking of drama before that for anything meaningful
for me at least, and then I'd done that for
ten years and then I made my first piece of

(30:55):
content online. So but I made it in quiet because
some of these things that you talk about here, and
I'm pointing this out because we can go back to
it after I answer your question. I was scared of
looking stupid. You talk about making more mistakes theory versus
reality in the book. This is page forty, and you
talk about looking stupid, feeling shame, being laughed at, and

(31:17):
experiencing discomfort. I was scared of all of those things
because now it was going beyond my community of people,
like five to ten people who used to come and
hear me speak. I had no idea what the online
world would bring. I had never done that before. I
didn't have any friends who'd ever created any online content,
so I couldn't check in with someone. I didn't have
a coach, and so I was kind of doing it
in quiet. And I think what was beautiful about that

(31:40):
is I got to really construct my own voice that
was authentic to who I was, and was just genuine
to who I was. So my earliest videos are half
spoken half spoken word because I loved rap music growing up.
So there's you'll hear lazy rhymes, you'll hear words that
cascade together, and it's inspired by what I loved as
a teenager. The visuals were I've always been into art

(32:02):
and design, and so that was very easy for me.
I love aesthetics, I love visuals, I love feelings and experiences.
So I edited all my own videos. Granted, the editing
was sloppy because of cuts and sound, which I didn't
know well, but it was still what was natural to me.
And then when I put out my first piece of video,
the first people to react with the people I knew,
and they were all like, Jay, you talked too fast,

(32:23):
the music's too loud. Well, we don't think this point
is that great, And it was all negative feedback, and
I kept going because I was getting some joy from it.
So in the beginning it was that way, and I
think I've tried to hold onto that as much as possible,
because as the scale grew, the plethora of negativity or
criticism or judgment got louder as well, and I started

(32:45):
to look at it more seriously because now you're worried
about perception and image and how you think people view
you and whether people see your truth or they don't,
and you can feel defensive. And I think where I've
got to now is I still get affected by it.
I'm so not beyond getting affected by negative comments or
challenging comments or criticisms, because my monk training is left

(33:10):
me vulnerable at some points, because I have created a
space in which to always allow advice to come in,
because though that's seen as a mark of wanting to
improve and wanting to be better, and I've had to
learn to balance that with also knowing my intention. So
what I've accepted is that the only thing I can
control is my intention being aligned and pure to what

(33:35):
I believe. Not pure like in a godly way, I
mean pure in what I believe. But the way my
action is received will come with advice, feedback, and criticism.
And all I can keep doing is keep refining my
intention and hope that that will channel the effect of
communication externally. And no matter how perfect ten it is,

(33:59):
it will ever be perfect, and therefore there will always
be criticism, no matter how phenomenal an idea it is
or whatever may be. So that's me meandering around your
question too. That's how I'm dealing with it. I don't
think that's a solution or a solve. It's how I'm
mentally kind of constructing bridges and walkways to navigate. How
stressful it is.

Speaker 2 (34:19):
I think it makes a lot of sense. It also
leaves me wondering is there a j shatty rap tour coming?
Ha ha, But I'll kidding aside, although I think there
would be an audience for that, I think one of
the things that you're making me think about is there's
a spectrum of you know, on one hand, we have
the monk ideal of either I'm open to everything or

(34:43):
I'm not going to live in fear of social disapproval.
On the other and I guess we have the monkey. Yeah,
just like we are social primates and anything that could
lose status could get us excluded, and this is really problematic.
I don't think either is really realistic for us as humans.

(35:03):
I think we're always going to care about what other
people think. And I think my goal is to say
I want to care enough about other people's reactions to
learn from them, but not so much that I feel
pressure to conform to them.

Speaker 1 (35:14):
It's powerful.

Speaker 2 (35:15):
Well, the way that I've tried to get to that
is to say, well, I'm always going to be disappointing somebody,
so let me decide whose opinions actually matter to me,
and then include myself in that group, and say it's
better to let down a bunch of strangers or a
bunch of people whose standards are not the same as
mine or whose taste doesn't match mine than it is

(35:37):
to let down the people I care about and myself too.

Speaker 1 (35:40):
What you inspired for me also with that conformity idea
is how I'm willing to be open enough to improve
but not see something as a reflection of my identity.
And I think that's where we all struggle. Where it's
like when someone says when someone laughs that you feel
like laughing at you, not at that particular event and

(36:03):
moment and day or evening or improv or whatever it was,
you feel you are someone who should feel shameful as
opposed to that was a moment where I made a mistake.
And I think that's where I think you struggle when
you hear feedback or advice that you start attaching to
your identity.

Speaker 2 (36:23):
I think that's it's a huge problem. And I think
one of the most reassuring bodies of research that I
guess speaks to this from the book is is the
overblown implications effect, the idea that when people see you
make a mistake, they don't actually attribute that to your
incompetence or your lack of character like you think they do.
So you know, you watch somebody you know take a

(36:45):
really crappy photo and their thumb is in the frame,
and you don't immediately think that person is incapable of
being a decent photographer, Like that was a bad photo, right,
It was literally a bad snapshot, and it's a snapshot
of a bad snapshot, so it's a meta a bad snapshot.

Speaker 1 (37:01):
You know.

Speaker 2 (37:02):
I think somebody you know is trying to cook and
they burn whatever is in the oven. You don't immediately
think they're a bad cook. You think, oh, they got distracted,
or they you know, didn't have the right recipe, or
this is the first time they're trying that. And I
think we're really good at recognizing that. In others we
don't sort of leap to conclusions that they're inescapably, hopelessly

(37:26):
flawed and that they're failing makes them a failure. But
I think in our own self talk and our self assessment,
we do so much of that, like I screwed this up,
I am a screw up, and everyone else is going
to know it.

Speaker 1 (37:39):
Yeah, so true, and it's and it gets it gets
really dark, it gets really really dark. I'm so glad
we went. Then. Thank you for asking me to reflect
on that too, because it's I'm always trying to find
better pathways mentally to deal with these things that you
have to navigate on a daily basis.

Speaker 2 (37:54):
I think we all are, and I don't think you
need to thank me for wanting to learn.

Speaker 1 (37:58):
Well, let's talk about that. I love this diagram that
you put in the book about how we think learning
happens versus how it actually happens. And I think that
idea of so how we think learning happens. I'll explain that,
and then you can explain how learning happens from your words.
Adam shows in the book this diagram that says knowledge
leads to comfort, leads to practice, leads to progress, which

(38:19):
is how we think learning happens. And I think so
many of our beliefs around learning do come from school,
and do come from even For me, learning happens in
that I learn something, now I know it fully, and
now that rule stands forever. And I think modern day
learning isn't that at all. Like I don't know any
rules that have completely stood forever, and apart from obviously

(38:42):
certain mathematical or scientific rules, of course, but most rules
in business, most rules in marketing, most rules in sales,
most rules in even a relationship. They change, they mold,
they grow. And so I think that fixed approach is
hard to shake because you were always at the end
of it. Well, you got the wrong answer. So it

(39:02):
was always about the answer, and it was always about well,
if you knew the rule, you would have got the
right answer. And today we feel I'm not getting the
right answer, so I must not know the right rule,
but that we're not finding that. So however, and reflect
on that and then guide us through the principle.

Speaker 2 (39:16):
You're right. We have a kind of had this ideal
in our heads that I'm going to reach a mastery
and then I'm done. Yes, it's a version of what
Taal ben Shahar is called the arrival fallacy, that you know,
I'll hit my destination and then everything will have changed.
And the reality is, when you reach mastery, you don't
freeze at that moment. You have to keep evolving your

(39:37):
knowledge and skills is the world around you evolves. And
I think what that leads a lot of people to
do is to spend far too much time trying to
get to the point of mastery before they ever really
try something. You know, from the book, I saw this
really clearly in examples of language learners. I mean, how
many people do you know that just concluded in high
school that they're incapable of mastering a foreign language? You Yeah,

(40:00):
what languages did you take?

Speaker 1 (40:02):
So we did French in German from year seven, so
eleven years old to like fourteen, and if we did
well at those I got to do Russian. So I
actually studied Russian for a year and we could read, write,
and speak for a whole year. It was really great learning.
And then I never got to practice any of those languages,
and so they all fell away, and then when I
went by the time I went to college, I had

(40:23):
already lost touch with all of them. So French, German,
and Russian were the ones I studied the most.

Speaker 2 (40:28):
Yeah, and so it sounds like you actually did experience
some progress, but then it didn't stick and you weren't
able to keep it up.

Speaker 1 (40:34):
Yes, exactly.

Speaker 2 (40:35):
Yeah, So I think that's pretty common. I think maybe
even more common is the like I don't have the
genes for this, I'm missing the language, the foreign language
gene or I missed my critical window. If only I had,
you know, if my parents had raised me bilingual, or
if I had started an immersion when I was four,
everything would be different. I met two amazing language learners

(40:55):
when I was When I was doing research for the book.
Sarah Maria has Boone and Ben Lewis, and they both
concluded after high school that they were incapable of learning
a foreign language. Sarah Maria could not make it through
Spanish and her father speaks fluent Spanish. Benny, I think
just had a disastrous experience with German, also with Irish.

(41:20):
And what's amazing about the two of them is that
combined they can speak a dozen languages fluently today a
dozen languages fluently conversationally. Even more so, they're polyglots. They're
people who not only talk but think in multiple languages.
They're effectively self taught, and they've picked it all up
in their twenties, thirties, ever beyond. It's amazing. So what

(41:41):
I wanted to know is what can we learn from them,
not just about language learning because but about any kind
of learning, because they are professional learners. And my biggest
takeaway from you know, talking to them and also juxtaposing
what they do with the evidence, is that language classes
are broken in a lot of schools because basically what
happens is you learn a vocabulary and a bunch of

(42:02):
rules of grammar, and then you're taught to more or
less just write it down, and very few schools do
extensive practice in speaking, which means that you never learn
to actually talk in the language, which means you're not
using the language and you don't practice enough to really
master it. What Sarah, Marie and Benny recommend is start
speaking from day one. Literally the first day you're picking

(42:24):
up a language, you start talking in it. And what
will happen is you do that, is you're going to
make loss of mistakes, but through using it, you're going
to start to internalize it. And in fact, one of
the things we know from the research is when you
make a mistake, you're more likely to remember the correct
answer because it really sticks, like, oh wait, I screwed
that up last time, let me now change it. So
I think the broader lesson here is that to go

(42:46):
all the way back to the diagram, I think a
lot of people want to wait to use their knowledge
until they've acquired it. Oh wow, it's not how learning happens.
The way learning happens is you got to use your
knowledge as you're acquiring it, and that's how you build it.
And that's a virtuous cycle.

Speaker 1 (43:00):
Oh my god, that you know, it's so interesting. I
don't think I've ever heard that put that way, I
feel like I've just and it's resonated so strongly with me.
Because as soon as I met Goronda Das, who's the
monk that I spent time with. As soon as I
met him, I had no qualification. But I went back
to college and started telling everyone about what I'd learned.
And then I'd go back and spend time with him

(43:21):
and go learn more and then come back and just
teach whatever I'd learned. And there was no I didn't
have any qualification to teach. I didn't I didn't understand
it fully, but it was like it was so much
more fun that way, and I allowed myself. I gave
myself the permission to say, I'm just going to teach
what I learned. I'm going to teach what I learn
up until now. I don't have to speak beyond my
level of realization or reflection. But I'm learning this. I'm

(43:43):
fascinated by it. Let me share it.

Speaker 2 (43:45):
Yeah, I mean that's that's a higher level version of
you know, of learning by doing, it's learning by teaching.

Speaker 1 (43:50):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (43:50):
And so often people like to say, well, those who
can't do teach, and I would edit that and say, no,
those who can't do can learn by teaching because exactly
as you found, when you explain something to someone else,
you remember it better and you also understand it better.
And I actually think anything you want to learn a

(44:12):
lot of people are trying to figure out what is
generative AI. You could go and take a class in it,
you could go tinker with it. I would say, go
teach a class in it, or get a group of
people together who are also interested in learning it, and
each of you take a module to teach the rest
of the group, and that's when you're really going to
internalize it and start to master it.

Speaker 1 (44:32):
Yeah. I love that. I mean, I'll butcher it now,
trying to say as well as you did.

Speaker 2 (44:37):
But yeah, because you always hurt for eloquence.

Speaker 1 (44:40):
No, no, no, But that idea but so much.

Speaker 2 (44:43):
Bad talker is a common that's actually a meme. I
don't know if it's if it's made it on your radar,
But like this guy's incoherent. We never understand a word
he says, he's just babbling constantly.

Speaker 1 (44:53):
No, but that particular state, And I honestly I love
that idea of how we're always waiting till we've something
until the end of something to feel like we can
play shared do and so there's a few that.

Speaker 2 (45:06):
Is well put. Yeah, that's exactly right. I'm like, I'm
trying to get to the end of the line and
then I will have made it and now I can
demo it, and now I can teach it.

Speaker 1 (45:16):
Yeah, And I think that making something public is so
horrifying because the reason why we struggle to go teach
a class on AI is because we're scared we're going
to be asked questions that we don't know the answer to.
And actually, your spot on that is exactly the best
way to learn, because you were able to say to
all those people, hey, I don't know, but i'll find

(45:37):
out for next time, or i'll email you the answer
whatever it may be. And I find that, but we
haven't created space for it to be okay to not know.

Speaker 2 (45:47):
No. I think that's right. And there's actually some work
on this in psychology which shows that when an expert
expresses uncertainty, they actually end up becoming more believable, in
part because people are surprised and then they listen more
carefully and realized, wow, this person does know what they're
talking about. I don't think that permission should only be
granted to experts. I think, in fact, the less you know,

(46:09):
the quicker you should be to say I have no idea.
And it's really ironic that only the people who know
the most often get to the point of feeling secure
in that knowledge to be able to say, yeah, I
have no clue, but let me let me do some
research on that and come back to you.

Speaker 1 (46:22):
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (46:23):
I mean I felt this as a teacher. I felt like,
especially in the you know, the major public speaking anxiety
does it day's early career, I felt like I had
to be able to regurgitate a study for every single
question that came up. I can imagine like I thought
that was my job, and I was really missing out
on the joy that that students get and also that
I get of saying I've never seen anyone explore that before.

(46:44):
I think that would make a great dissertation. Have you
ever thought about coming to a PhD program? And I
don't know. I think part of the joy of learning
is that every answer raises at least nine new questions,
and I think that we close that off when when
we expect people to always have an answer.

Speaker 1 (47:00):
You've mentioned a few times and even in your diving example,
the need for a coach. You know, I feel like
therapy culture has and is still slowly penetrating. Like we
I think, if you're in the circle, you think of
it as like really accessible and easy and it's a
big deal and the stigmatized correct. And the truth is
it isn't across the board. It's getting there. It's slowly
becoming destigmatized. I think the idea of finding a coach

(47:23):
is so unless you're an athlete, it seems so far
as an idea or as a thought process of how
you approach things. I know there are executive coaches that
have definitely kind of got into the zeitgeish, but still
finding a coach is quite an alien approach. I find
that people have. There's stigma there, there's confusion there, there's
a lack of understanding of what is a coach? How

(47:45):
have you thought about it? Seeing as you've mentioned it
a bunch of times and in the book and today.

Speaker 2 (47:49):
Well, I think we're actually comfortable with it in certain domains. Right,
so no one would ever hesitate to say, all right,
I want my kid to learn the piano. They need
a piano teacher. So I think when it comes to
you know, to hobbies and you know, kind of skills
early in life. Everybody knows they need a coach to
learn the basics and then move toward intermediate and then hopefully,

(48:10):
you know, figure out if this is something they want
to pursue further. I think where it starts to become
a little uncomfortable is when you're an adult and you
think that you should be able to teach yourself everything,
or you want to be self reliant, not dependent on
someone else. And I think that's that's a broken mental
model of a coach. A coach is actually I think

(48:30):
a good coach is trying to work him or herself
out of a job and say, obviously, I'm going to
give you lots of advice and I'm going to try
to help you improve, but at some point you should
internalize the way that I look at your performance, the
way that I think about helping you make progress, to
the degree that you can figure out what would I
say like after this, and then apply that advice. And
at that point you're probably ready for a new coach

(48:52):
who has different knowledge and skills to share with you.
And I think that's where I would start, is I
would say, coaches are all around us, you know, going
back to the asking for advice idea, right, you ask
people for advice, you start to turn them into your coaches,
and there's no reason why you can't formalize this. A
lot of and you're familiar with this. A lot of
writers have writing groups where somebody's working out a manuscript

(49:12):
and then you know four or five other writers are
basically coaching them and trying to help them improve it.
I don't think that should be limited to you know,
it has to be my job, or it has to
be the hobby I'm trying to improve at. I think
anything you want to you want to get better at,
you could just ask for somebody to give you informal
coaching and then you learn really quickly, is this person's
perspective helpful to me in this domain?

Speaker 1 (49:32):
Absolutely? Absolutely?

Speaker 2 (49:33):
Are you a coach?

Speaker 1 (49:34):
I'm looking for one right now. Funnily enough, that's why
I asked you, and I think for me at the.

Speaker 2 (49:39):
Moment, now we know why you were asking, how do
I figure out what to grow on?

Speaker 1 (49:43):
Yeah? Exactly, And I think there's that feeling for me
about I'd say, if I really worded it accurately and
clearly it would be I'm reintegrating and re renewing and
refining my value because my life has changed so drastically,
and so there were times when I felt like I

(50:07):
had kept up with the pace of my external growth,
and then all of a sudden, I was like, oh, no,
this is way bigger than I thought it was, and
this is so different from how I lived just ten
to fifteen years ago, and I want to realign and
reconnect with that, if that makes sense us. And so

(50:29):
I think that is something which I've given myself personal
time to do regularly, to refine, to realign, to reconnect.
But to do it with someone else who can see
beyond and maybe has had experience of two very opposite
worlds and has traversed those parts may be really helpful.
And so I think that's what I would be looking for,

(50:51):
and so coaching would be the right modality for that.

Speaker 2 (50:53):
I think it could be. I think it's interesting. There
are two levels of that that I think could be fruitful.
The first one is exactly the you framed it, which is,
let me take a step back and figure out what
my values are and how my core principles in life
have changed should change moving forward.

Speaker 1 (51:09):
That's what it is.

Speaker 2 (51:10):
But I think the other layer of it is saying,
maybe the values are the same, but your opportunity set
has evolved. So what does it mean to live your
values now given those opportunities?

Speaker 1 (51:19):
Correct? Absolutely, absolutely, there we go.

Speaker 2 (51:22):
I've got a few candidates for you. I'll suggest them
off on.

Speaker 1 (51:25):
Please love I genuinely love that. Yeah, I know. And
that's definitely been where my head's been at probably the
most most recently. And it's and again, I usually sit
with something like this and let it simmer and let
it clarify. And it's nice in a form like this
to be able to vocalize it in an articulate way.
And that's another beautiful thing about talking to someone else
about it. If you keep going around it in your

(51:46):
own head, chances are you won't say as articulately as
you would say to someone else because you wanted to
make sense to them.

Speaker 2 (51:52):
That's one of my favorite things about conversation. There was
a biographer once. It was em Forster's biographer. She used
this beautiful phrase called inverse charisma, which was the idea.
She said Forrester had this ability to ask you such
insightful questions with such sincere interest that he brought out

(52:13):
a more insightful, more charming version of yourself than existed.
Like that's part of what a good coach is. I
actually think great coaches are filled with in verse charisma.
They're not giving the rousing halftime speech all the time
or the pep talk. They're not always necessarily kicking you
in the butt, you know, to get you to work

(52:34):
harder or persist longer. I think what they're doing is
is posing challenges and ideas for you that bring out
a better version of you.

Speaker 1 (52:42):
Yes, yes, I couldn't agree more. And I think that
is where hidden potential is. I mean, it's someone is
not planting potential. It's not manufactured potential. It's not inception potential.
It's hidden potential. It's there and someone's helping ask the
questions so you can keep revealing and peeling way the layers.
And I think that is exactly what a good coach does.

(53:03):
Good coach is not telling you who you are, or
telling you the answer, or telling you who you could be.
It's allowing you to discover that for yourself, which is
needed for someone else to do that, because otherwise you're
just stuck in your head saying I'm not that. I
remember a coach years ago when I had left the monastery,
I was working at Accenture in London, and he'd always
say to me, you're an entrepreneur. Just from watching you,

(53:25):
I can observe that you're an entrepreneur. And I'd be like, no,
I'm not an entrepreneur. I don't want to be an entrepreneur.
And I said I would fight and debate that with him,
I would give him all the reasons, and he said, Jay,
one day you'll see. And now I look back and
I think, wow, I was. That is exactly who I was,
not in the in the way that it may be
seen in the world, but the autonomy, the wanting of

(53:46):
being artistic, being a leader, wanting to create, wanting to
produce without with freedom and without restraint, like all of
that quality of an entrepreneur. I think language is so
limiting too. It is yeah, right, yeah, you're.

Speaker 2 (53:58):
Right, if you would, if you would defy, and entrepreneurship
back then as being someone who sees opportunities and then
creates a vision and then builds around that without giving
up a ton of freedom, Like yeah, of course, that's
who I am.

Speaker 1 (54:11):
And instead you're like, I got to be I don't
want to start like that's that's really in my head.
I was like, I don't want to manage people like
I don't Yeah.

Speaker 2 (54:18):
Yeah, I got to be pitching a scrub daddy on
shark tape.

Speaker 1 (54:20):
Yeah yeah, yeah, that's yeah. I don't want to start
business like that's not you know, that's not what I
want to do with my life. And so, yeah, it's fascinating.
Our language limits us. And I was going to ask
you that about that, like, how do you feel comfortable?
And this is chapter three of your book, The Impact Imperfectionists,
finding the sweet spot between flawed and flawless? How do
you allow yourself to release anything when you know it's

(54:44):
going to be flawed and imperfect Because I think that
that's the challenge right with the book, especially with social
media less so it's it's short form and short terms,
so there's it's easier to get to what you want
to get to. But with a book with a to
with a obviously, as a professor, I mean, everything you're teaching,
you know people are going to practice it for years potentially.

(55:07):
How do you feel comfortable putting something out that's imperfect
and incomplete.

Speaker 2 (55:11):
This is a little embarrassing, but I have to say so.
I after writing the book, I said, all right, I
want to use some of the psychometric tools that we
were trained in to create a fun quiz for people
to identify what their greatest character strength is among those
and then also an area for growth. So I finished
the quiz, I sent it out to a bunch of
people to pilot it, and then it was time for

(55:32):
me to take it. And after writing this whole chapter
about what I've learned about being an imperfectionist, my lowest
score was imperfectionism. So I am not fully recovered from perfectionism,
and it's sometimes hard for me to release things. I
think what's helped me is a couple of things. One
the calibration of saying, okay, if it's something as big

(55:54):
as a book, I mean, I'm aiming for a nine
like this. I'm going to pour a lot of time
into it. Hopefully a lot of people are going to
engage with it, and so I really want it to
be as good as I'm capable of doing at that
moment in my life. If it's a social media post,
like I'm content with a six and some people might
get angry at me, some people might misunderstand me. I'm

(56:15):
definitely gonna learn something, and it's better to put out
a bunch of potential sixes and hit some mates than
to post once a year. As somebody who cares a
lot about both sharing knowledge and learning from other people's
reactions to those you know, those posts, I think that's
been really helpful. And I guess what I've realized through
that is if you never put anything out into the world,
then you're actually limiting your contribution. And I think when

(56:39):
when psychologists study regret, it's pretty clear that in the
short run, people are afraid of failing, but in the
long run, they're more afraid of failing to try. And
that's that's kind of where I've I've come down, is
I'd rather fail than fail to try it all.

Speaker 1 (56:53):
It's really fascinating. You said something there which I really
resonate with, is this idea that part of the is
in the sharing and seeing reactions. And I think we underestimate,
like I could honestly sit down and think I know
everything about a subject and keep quizzing myself and think
I know everything, but the moment I share it with
someone else and they ask a question, I'll be like, oh,

(57:14):
I should have been you know that was missing. I
didn't think of that. And so sharing it in some form,
even if it's not the complete form, but sharing a
talk based on one of the chapters, or sharing I
often do that with podcasts, Like when I have an idea,
I'm like, oh, let me just record a podcast episode
about that and see what people have to think about it.
And it's a great way of just experimenting and testing
and seeing what part of it I didn't consider. Yes,

(57:37):
because someone will consider it, And we don't see that
as part of the growth process. We see as separate.
We see as I'm going to make something complete, people
are going to have exactly the reaction I want to it,
and that will be the success of it.

Speaker 2 (57:49):
Yeah. I think that's right. I think the medium also matters,
So podcasting is much more forgiving medium. I think that
book writing one hundred percent because nobody expects you to
have said everything exactly right in the moment, whereas a book.
But yeah, you say something wrong in a book, it's like, well,
shouldn't you have done your research? Yeah, why didn't you
fact check that one of the things that I see

(58:09):
a lot of people hold back on when it comes
to sharing anything they've created. Is so many people limit
themselves by saying I don't want to self promote.

Speaker 1 (58:19):
I'm so glad we're going here, let's go there.

Speaker 2 (58:21):
This this is not about me. I'm like good because
there is a huge difference between self promotion and idea promotion.
Promoting yourself is saying, look at me, look at how
great I am. I'm special. You're sharing the awardsy one,
You're posting a lot of selfies here, you're in the spotlight.
I think idea promotion is really different, which is to
say I made something I'm proud of. I hope it's

(58:44):
valuable to you. I hope you get some joy out
of it. If you don't put that out in the world,
you're depriving people of benefiting from what you poured your
heart into. And that that to me, seems like a mistake.

Speaker 1 (58:56):
Yeah, did you always feel like that it was something
you had to wrap your head around, Because that's something
I definitely had to wrap my head around. So I'm intrigued. No,
Because as a professor, I just don't imagine putting a
book on promoting like that doesn't come naturally Like that
isn't feel.

Speaker 2 (59:09):
Not at all.

Speaker 1 (59:09):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (59:10):
No, I remember a few weeks after I got tenure,
colleague wrote and said, Hey, I'm thinking about writing a
book about motivation. You've done a lot of research in
this area. Do you want to co author it? Wow?
I love I loved working with this collaborator. Huge admirer
of his work. This is a great honor. And I've
always wanted to to figure out if there's a way
I could share my ideas more broadly than just with

(59:31):
the students I happened to meet in the classroom. I
immediately I had a lab meeting later that day with
a group of undergraduates and I told them I was
going to do this, and they had a mutiny, like no,
you cannot. You cannot write a book about somebody else's ideas.
You need to write your own book, Like Nope, can't
do it. I cannot do that. This is like I
don't feel comfortable to it. I hardly even teach my

(59:54):
own research in the classroom. I want to. I want
to share with you the knowledge that I've found most useful.
Like I don't think my my research is like the
most important thing for me to teach you. And they
push back really hard, and they said, look, you have
a responsibility if you've invested a lot of your own
time and energy and you know in the work that
you do, to share that more broadly and get it

(01:00:15):
out there and see what people think of it. And
they basically held me hostage. They said, you're not leaving
this lab meeting until you agree you will write your
own book before you help somebody else do theirs. And
eventually they logic bullied me into agreeing, and I kind
of came around and said, Okay, this is what we do.

(01:00:36):
We don't create knowledge for it to collect us in
academic journals or for it to only be available to
students who are lucky enough to get into an Ivy
League school. That's not right. I believe in democratizing knowledge,
So yeah, I'm going to do This book came out
a little bit beforehand. I send an email to my
network just saying, hey, you know, I wrote this book.
If you find it interesting or useful, would be really

(01:00:59):
grateful if you would help spread the word. The responses
were so lovely, but I got one email that kind
of crushed me in the moment, and it was from
an academic colleague who said, dear Adam, love the book,
hate this self promotion. This was my fear. And I
thought about it and I ruminated about it, and then

(01:01:21):
it hit me, this is not self promotion. It's idea
of promotion. This is about the knowledge contained in the book.
I went out of my way to site a bunch of,
you know, a long list of researchers. Later I was
told too many. I was trying to synthesize a body
of knowledge and get it out there. And we have
to be to a certain degree in the spotlight in
order to promote our work. And I think, you know,

(01:01:42):
people want to connect to the author, the narrator, and
so there's a I think an amount of self disclosure
that's required, but self promotion that does not have to happen.
And I looked at the book and I said, Okay,
the main things I've shared about myself are mistakes I made,
times I failed, and what I learned from those. So
I feel okay saying this was idea promotion, not self promotion.

(01:02:04):
And that's for me the litmus test ever since. So
that I guess that's how I landed at that distinction.

Speaker 1 (01:02:09):
It's such an interesting thing for any artist, any creative,
any academic, any any person who feels that they've come
across something worth sharing. And that's why I've always been
a fan of anyone who has anything worth sharing, because
there are so many I think, isn't Ted's what's Ted's tagline?
Or at one point idea is worth spreading? Ideas worth spreading?

Speaker 2 (01:02:30):
I like sharing better. Yeah, I don't want to assume
that every idea should be spread, but share it with
someone and let's find out.

Speaker 1 (01:02:36):
Yeah, sharing, And I think we all have ideas worth sharing,
we have insights worth sharing of some kind, and especially
if you an artists, creates for academic and I think
for me it was a very very similar journey to yours.
And it's so interesting to hear that academic circles and
spiritual circles can often have the same habits of behavior.
And for me, when I wrote Think like a Monk,

(01:02:58):
which was my first book, the biggest thing I was
trying to do, and what I learned in my second book,
which if I would have known in my first book,
I would have done this is kind of explain this
thought process where I tried to do it intuitively in
how I shared it, as opposed to explicitly spelled it out,
whereas now I'm much better at explicitly spelling out what

(01:03:18):
I'm doing. I did that to honor all monk traditions.
So I studied lots of different monk traditions. I spoke
to lots of different monks, and so it wasn't just
the tradition I studied in. So that was very important
to me because I believed that there were traditions beyond
mind that would have values to share and important messages
to share. The other thing that I tried to do

(01:03:38):
in the book was I definitely have always wanted to
make ancient wisdom accessible, practical, and relevant. That has always
been my mission. Because I'm trying to speak to the
eighteen year old kid that I was in London before
I got into spirituality and meditation and mindfulness. I'm not

(01:03:59):
trying to to the person I am now or someone
who's already learned a ton and so to me, to
make it simple and accessible and relevant was my biggest
goal and always has been, and that can often come
with the critique of you're watering it down, you're oversimplifying it.
This isn't the truth in the way it should be shared.
And the other thing was similar to you, and I

(01:04:20):
love that you said that too. I never shared an
enlightened experience in the book. All the experiences are mistakes
there when meditation went wrong. Me being envious, they're me
judging people, They're me wanting to get what the monks
have without having done the work, like all the stories
that the human experience of a kid from London who
doesn't have the qualification to be where he is in

(01:04:42):
this space, trying to make sense of it. And and
so the book was it wasn't think like me like
that was in the book. It was called think like
a monk, Like I'm not a monk anymore, and I
want to show us how we can think like monks
but not live like monks. And I think it was
really interesting to me, just our again it comes from
our preconceived notion on ideas, language having baggage and thoughts

(01:05:04):
where people were just like, oh, but you're not a
monk anymore, so how do you teach that? And this
isn't your life? And it was so interesting to me
that we couldn't learn from things that the things I'd
learned and gained as opposed to if you're not exactly
that thing anymore, then you can't teach it.

Speaker 2 (01:05:20):
I think there are things you could study that you
don't have to share. If you were just really fascinated
by painting or rare coins, you could say this is
a personal interest to mine, and it's just it's my
own curiosity. I think. You and choosing to be a monk,
me and choosing to be a psychologist, we chose to

(01:05:42):
take a deep dive into the mind and human behavior.
If we gain knowledge from that. It feels like it's
selfish not to share it, Like, why would you keep
that to yourself? Why should the wisdom of monks only
be accessible to monks. That doesn't seem right.

Speaker 1 (01:05:54):
Yeah, it doesn't seem right at all. It feels like
taking away. It feels selfish. And also to honor those people.
To me, the book was honoring these amazing people that
have done it for their whole lives and studies of
people who meditated for forty years and you know that's
not me, And I just found it interesting that. Yeah,
it's fascinating. And there's a great book by Austin Cleon

(01:06:14):
called Show Your Work yes, and I really like it,
and I recommend that to anyone who's struggling with showing
their work because it's exactly and I love the way
you've differentiated been self promotion and idea promotion. And I
really hope that that stays with people who are listening
and watching, because if you have an idea that you
believe is worth sharing and worth helping people and supporting people,
please don't hold onto it, like please don't hide it

(01:06:37):
from the world, because I worry for us to only
be exposed to the same three ideas that everyone's exposed to,
because we hide away from all these other new ones.

Speaker 2 (01:06:46):
Sometimes they hear people hold back for another reason, which
is they're afraid somebody is going to steal their idea.
And Austin Cleon wrote about this and Steal Like an Artist, Yeah,
another book of his that I found very thought provoking.
My response to that is, you know what, it is
possible that somebody will steal your idea. Most of the
time that won't be intentional, but what psychologists have sometimes

(01:07:08):
called kleptomnesia, where you misremember an idea as your own
and forget the source. That can happen inadvertently you hear
an idea, you know, you don't necessarily track where you
learned it, and then you know it kind of bubbles
up a month later and you think you thought of it.
I think that can happen. Ideas can get stolen on purpose,

(01:07:28):
They can get stolen by accident. What I always want
to say to people who are afraid of their ideas
getting stolen is if you have one big idea and
you're afraid of putting it out there because you think
someone else is going to steal it, you don't have
a lot of ideas, and people who generally succeed with
ideas are people who are constantly generating ideas. And so

(01:07:49):
what you should do is you should generate a whole
portfolio of ideas, and then you're not identified with any
one of them, you don't feel attached to just one
of them, and then the risk goes way down.

Speaker 1 (01:07:59):
Yeah, this so many blocks that we could talk about.
Whether it's and I mean, one's the ego, right, So
the self promotion is almost like an inverse ego. So
it's almost like we think we're better because we're not
promoting an idea. It's like we're we're we're doing that
right this, Yeah, like that is ironic, Yeah, right, Like

(01:08:19):
it's like I think I'm better because I'm not monetizing
or democratizing or public popularizing and publicizing. Yes, yeah, popularizing
or publicizing an idea makes it better to not do that.
You talk about the ego differently, but let's talk about
in that category first of all. Like it's it's interesting
how that scene as are holier than thou kind of approach,

(01:08:42):
and I don't think either is holier. I just think
that one's compassionate and and to me, that's more what
it is. Like I think when someone shares an idea
about an experience that I could never have, to me,
that's just compassion. It's their compassion to share with me.

Speaker 2 (01:08:58):
Yeah, I mean, there's no reason why people can have
multiple motives behind their behavior, and I actually do, I
mean almost always to us. Yeah, I think it's very
rare that people are conscious of all their motives or
willing to admit to all of them. But I actually
think the most sustainable route to unlocking people's HIDEN potential
is to try to align their you know, their personal

(01:09:20):
aspirations with social good. And I don't think there's anything
wrong with saying yeah, I want to promote this idea,
both because I wanted to help other people and because
I appreciate people respecting my knowledge and considering me a
credible source. Like I actually think it would be problematic
if you're like, yep, I care nothing about my own

(01:09:41):
reputation whatsoever. Like only character matters to me. And even
if people think I'm an idiot and I'm dishonest and
I lack integrity, like, as long as I know I'm
a good person, that's good. Like that's just not functional
in the social world. And so I think we should
give people. This is another we need to give people
the space to say yes, like I do want to

(01:10:03):
be valued and appreciated for things that I think are important,
and I want to add value to other people too.

Speaker 1 (01:10:08):
Oh I'm so glad you went there. Yeah, it's so important.
It's so important to allow ourselves that too, Like, yeah,
do I like it when someone leaves me a nice
review on the podcast or the book? I do? Yeah,
I love it. It feels great. And do I do things
because they make me feel good? Yes, I do, and
I'm sure And at the same time, it comes from
a place of wanting to do good in the world
and wanting to spread ideas that will help people and

(01:10:31):
serve people and support people and hopefully help them transform
their own lives. And it comes from both of those places.
I want to do things that make me feel good
and do good in the world. Like I think that's
I don't know any other way. Actually I don't either, Yeah,
And I don't know how to live in a world.
If I only tried to do good to others, I
would automatically feel good from that anyway. But if I

(01:10:53):
was only to do things that were only good for me,
I don't think I'd be satisfied either.

Speaker 2 (01:10:57):
No, I mean you'd lack the purpose that someone of
your work concentrates on.

Speaker 1 (01:11:01):
What was the thing you found most surprising when writing
Hidden Potential About Hidden Potential, specifically that kind of you
were like, Oh wow, I didn't I'd never to find this.

Speaker 2 (01:11:10):
I think the first one was was the idea that
learning character skills can be more powerful than learning cognitive skills,
assuming that you have a foundation and you know in
thinking skills that learning to embrace discomfort and become more
of a sponge and accept the right imperfections like that
that could fuel more growth than you know, if you're
an entrepreneur, learning finance and marketing stunning, and that you

(01:11:33):
can learn those skills in your forties and fifties as
opposed to thinking that those character skills are set when
you're young. That I found liberating and encouraging. So that
was a surprise. I think that maybe a bigger surprise though,
just as I think through the insights that I picked
up as I was investigating, I think I had this
image of people who, you know, not just to achieve

(01:11:56):
greater things, but achieve the greatest things. I had this
image that they just figured out how to make the
daily grind just tolerable. I think about Steph Curry just,
you know, drilling over and over again to shoot as
well as he does. I assumed that he just figured
out how to not mind the monotony and the boredom

(01:12:18):
and the exhaustion, and he would just power through it,
and he had a superhuman ability to tolerate extreme amounts
of discomfort. Light bulb. While reading the research on deliberate practice,
was like, it's not that motivating for a lot of
people to just do the same activity repetitively over and
over again. If you're Steph Curry shooting is fun like
doing wind sprints and then trying to make baskets when

(01:12:39):
you can hardly breathe, and doing that over and over again,
like not anybody's like not my idea of joy, and
don't I don't think it's Stepf's either. And through the
research I read, and through spending time with his trainer
who designed this set of routines that had really elevated
his game, I realized that deliberate play is a huge
part of practice and we don't give it enough credit.

(01:13:00):
That you know, if your Steph, you play a game
to see how many baskets you can make it in a
minute and a half, and then you've got a target
to shoot for and you're competing against yourself or you're
competing against a clock, and all of a sudden, that
supercharges your motivation, especially in the summer when nobody's you know,
when you're not actually playing basketball games that really count.

(01:13:21):
And I looked at that and thought, why do we
have to turn the daily grind into such a grind? Like, yes,
there are times when we all have to push ourselves,
but pushing yourself day after day is not a sustainable routine.
And what we want to do is try to figure
out how to redesign practice and skill development so that
there are you could break skills down into these enjoyable
pieces and then make them more playful. You mentioned Dan Coyle.

(01:13:43):
I love the Culture Code, and one of my favorite
ideas that he wrote about was the difference between shallow
fun and deep fund. I think shallow fun is gamification.
It's tricking people into enjoying practice even though they don't
really like it, because there's a carrot that's being dangled
at the end. I think the deep fund is about
saying we want to actually take the process of learning
itself and make it enjoyable. And so, you know, the

(01:14:04):
stuff example is a great one, but it's easy to
think about that in basketball. Evelyn Glenny are percussionist saying like,
let me figure out if I could harmonize bach on
a snare drum, Like, what a cool way to make
learning percussion playful. And I think that that was a
big aha for me. I think that I had come

(01:14:25):
to see play as a reward for finishing my to
do list and mastering a skill, and now I realize
it's got to be on the to do list and
it's got to be part of learning a skill.

Speaker 1 (01:14:35):
That resonates so strongly as well. Again, it's like, yeah,
the process has to be fun, meaningful and fulfilling in
and of itself, not just a reward. Trying to think
about activity that I've done that with that just felt
impossible to do it with have you? Have you? What
was the thought experiment that you did there with?

Speaker 2 (01:14:52):
Well? I was wondering, Yeah, this had to. I feel
like monks are often misunderstood like a complete denial of
any earthly joy. Yes, And I don't see how a
human could ever function in that environment. So I guess
the question is you had to do a lot of
hard stuff as a monk, especially I imagine in training,

(01:15:12):
like how did you make that playful?

Speaker 1 (01:15:14):
You made it playful by laughing at yourself like it
was right. So the thing that came to mind was
often we'd walk down a path and we'd be asked
to find a new stone, and the goal was to
find something and be really present with it and you know,
be aware of it. Its colors, it's texture, it's shape.
Everything you'd want to practice through a mindfulness practice, And

(01:15:35):
what the mind would do is I'd find a stone
for today, and I'd find a stone for tomorrow so
that I didn't have to do the same activity tomorrow.
Because we want to make things easier mentally, and we're
always trying to cheat the system or you know, break
the game. So my mind would do that very naturally.
I'd find two stones of all right, I saw that
one where that is behind that tree to today, I'll
pick this one tomorrow, found one anyway, and then we'd

(01:15:57):
get to the next day and the teacher would say,
all right, today, we'd to find a petal like and
they're just switched it up on you, and you'd laugh
at your own mind, like you'd find it hilarious that
your mind was trying to gain the system. But the
monks are too, you know, already one step ahead of you.
They already know that built it exactly. And so I
think things like that where learning to laugh at yourself

(01:16:19):
brought play. When you saw the monkey mind, as you
mentioned earlier, you laughed at it. You didn't you went
harsh on yourself. You didn't if you saw a monkey.
And I've seen monkeys do this in India, steal people's sunglasses,
cut bags if you're holding it to grab fruit. Yeah,
dieco stealing. I've seen them steal credit cards, like out

(01:16:39):
of people's hands if they're paying for something. You don't
look at it and go what an idiot? Like what's
wrong with you? You just think, oh, monkeys and you just laugh.
And that's partly what the mind is like, Like it's
it's funny to watch the flawed mind, uh and not
take it so seriously and recognize that it's just how
it's built and how it's how it acts.

Speaker 2 (01:17:00):
I like that a lot. Yeah, Yeah, I mean I
think the idea of you know, of taking your your
goals and your growth seriously, but not yourself and your
ego that seriously is obviously powerful there. It also sounds
like your teachers really appreciated the importance of novelty and variety,
absolutely saying all right, like we got to switch up
stones for pedals just to keep making this interesting and

(01:17:21):
make sure you don't lose your curiosity.

Speaker 1 (01:17:23):
Yeah, and just recognizing that you were going to you know,
I remember saying to one of my teachers one so
I was like, I was like, oh, you know, I'm
just really struggling with my ego. I don't think it's
ever going to go away. It's so big, it's so
hard to deal with. I see it come up in
so many scenarios and they just be like relaxed, just
you know, it's okay, like your ego wi always be there.
Just do your service. Like it wasn't seen with as

(01:17:43):
much like kind of pain and stress because they understood
it's hard. They get that, like they know what the
mind is going to do, and so why would they
react to it with this like very serious and kind
of imprisoned undertone rather than like, yeah, it's going to
be there, just do it. I like that idea of
just just do it anyway. It's going to be there,

(01:18:04):
do it anyway, like okay. So you might feel you
have too much of an ego to give a talk,
do it anyway and be aware of it. Right, be
aware of something and do it anyway is far better
than wait till you overcome your ego to do something
like that, you'll be waiting for the rest of your life.
It will never disappear, and that's just ego could be
anything obviously, like envy or any of the things you mentioned.

Speaker 2 (01:18:25):
I don't know that it's realistic to expect it to disappear. Altogether.
I think what you want is not too me. You
wanted to be in the rear view mirror so that
it's not your primary focus, but you're you're checking in
on it every once in a while.

Speaker 1 (01:18:36):
Exactly, Adam. There are so many things in Hidden Potential.
We could talk for hours and hours, and I don't.
I want people to actually read the book. I want
to be able to pick it up. I want you
to go and grab a copy of Hidden Potential. The
Science of Achieving Greater Things. As we've talked about today,
there's such a need for progress, there's such a need
for growth. I think this book breaks it down, makes
it simple in a way that I love and I admire.
But on top of all of that, it's packed with

(01:18:58):
great stories, case studies, science and research to back it
all up. And in Adam's signature style of making it fun,
that the natural humor that always comes through. But thank
you for doing this, And I wanted to ask you them.
Is there anything you haven't shared either from the book
and that's come in your mind and heart that you're like, Yeah,
I really want people to know this or share this,
and they may not be, but I want to give
you the flow.

Speaker 2 (01:19:18):
That's well, you're as always too kind. No, I mean,
the only thing is I'm second guessing, like, was that
the most surprising thing? Should there have been a more
surprising thing? I am right now failing my imperfectionist tests.
It doesn't matter which one I picked, because no one
knows what the alternatives were, but I am curious. So

(01:19:39):
we talked about deliberate play being you know, potentially as
important or more important than deliberate practice for growth. The
other two that I was just starting to think about,
where that when you get stuck, you often have to
move back to move forward. That before people leap in
a scale, they have to dip. That was not ha
that I did not have before.

Speaker 1 (01:19:57):
Yeah, that's better you're doing about climbing the mountain, the
idea of like, yeah, like that it's better if you're stuck,
not just to stand there, but to walk backwards to
kind of kind of around.

Speaker 2 (01:20:07):
Yes, yes, yeah, a better method.

Speaker 1 (01:20:09):
Actually, most of us don't move backwards to move forwards.
We've remained stuck because we're too embarrassed to move backwards,
or we feel too like we've reached somewhere to move backwards,
like there's a comfort.

Speaker 2 (01:20:20):
I don't want to give up the games that I met.

Speaker 1 (01:20:21):
Yes, yes, that's exactly, And so why.

Speaker 2 (01:20:23):
When I start over when I've already put so much
time into getting where I got.

Speaker 1 (01:20:28):
That sun cost bias is that was huge for me.
I remember learning about that in like a level economics,
like eighteen years seventeen, eighteen years old, and thinking, what
a great concept to understand that. And I kind of
gave that up very naturally. But I saw that as
I grow older, people who'd studied something, especially something I
had friends who would become lawyers or doctors, but then
didn't enjoy it or didn't see that as their path

(01:20:50):
directly even and having to pivot from that was so
hard because it worked so hard to achieve something that
is rare and hard and difficult.

Speaker 2 (01:20:58):
Yeah, one of the things I would like to remind
my students of when they, like they come to office
hours and they're in tunnel vision, like I have to
do the prescribed thing, like my parents want me to
be a doctor, or everyone in my family went to
law school. I always want to say to them, listen,
I understand that you're already down this path, like you've
done the pre med thing, or you're already, Like, you know,
you're already in the program, But what's worse realizing that

(01:21:22):
you wasted the last two years are going on to
waste the next twenty. It's not a hard calculus. And
so I think maybe the antidote to sun costs is
opportunity cost to say, yeah, you know what, you have
already invested a whole bunch in this, But think about
all the growth and all the joy that you're giving
up on if you don't shift gears.

Speaker 1 (01:21:44):
Yeah, yeah, I think. I mean I think about that
all the time in my own life. And it's hard
because you never know it then. And it's the old
Steve Jobs quote of you can't connect the dots moving forwards,
your only backward. Yeah, only backwards. And it's hard to
remind people almost as their future self. And I I
think that is the activity. That's what I did. I
fast forwarded when I was working in the corporate world.

(01:22:05):
I fast forwarded twenty years and I asked myself, would
I be happy doing what I see other people doing
twenty years ahead of me? And the answer was no.
And so I was like, well, then anything will be
better than this, because if the answer is no, and
It's not that they had bad jobs so they weren't happy.
It's that I wouldn't be happy doing what they were
doing twenty years from then, and so if you're not,
then you can't keep following the same path. Adam, I

(01:22:28):
actually have two more questions from you that I just
saw my notes that I actually don't want to miss
asking these to you. This comes from part three, systems
of Opportunity, Opening Doors and Windows, and I are these
two questions that I think are really interesting. We talked
about certain challenges of our school system and what we
find wrong, but this was the interesting part for me.

(01:22:48):
Do you believe children should be able to choose what
they study? I think it's a really fascinating concept. One
of my friends runs schools where kids do get to choose.
It's private, and I'm always fascinated by this idea of
we've gone from living in a world that kids had
no choice, we naturally swing to the other side of

(01:23:09):
the pendulum where we want to give kids all choice.
What did you discover?

Speaker 2 (01:23:12):
I think this is really complicated. So the research on
the paradox of choice suggests that there is such a
thing as too much choice. First of all, there's a
lot of debate about how pervasive that is. It's much
worse to have no choice than too much, much worse.
So it's easier to manage the problem of too many
options than it is to create freedom where it's absent.
I think that's clear. The second thing is we can

(01:23:36):
think about bundling and sort of bucketing choices in a
way that maybe gets the best of both worlds. So
I think it's potentially helpful for students to have choices
within constraints. For example, so you ask, if you're an
elementary school teacher, you ask kids to read thirty minutes
a night, but they get to pick the book. I

(01:23:56):
think that's the kind of choice we're looking for early on.
I think later, probably in high school, every kid should
take some math, but I don't think everyone needs to
take trig Trigonometry has never been useful in my life.
In a heartbeat, I would throw out the Trigg curriculum
and replace it with statistics, which I think actually is
useful for how people think and what they do in

(01:24:16):
the world.

Speaker 1 (01:24:16):
But not everyone feels no cognitive benefits of doing Triggy.
They're like, oh, they know, because I often think about
things not being as literal and think, oh wait, is
my brain developing by thinking in that ways.

Speaker 2 (01:24:27):
I have never seen a randomized controlled experiment saying that
learning trigonometry will teach you a set of thinking skills
that it's invaluable. Like, I don't think there's anything about
sign and cosign that you would get that you can't
get through geometry. Would be my hunch as a psychologists,
But I have not done that experiment or that series
of experiments I think. But what I would say is
like within I mean, colleges are much better at this
right saying there's a math requirement, but we give you

(01:24:48):
a menu of options and you can choose within that.
Nobody wants to go to a restaurant and have a
menu with a thousand options, but if they kind of
know what they like, they can say I can look
at that category, I can choose within it, And I
think that's where I would want choice to land. For
kids at different levels.

Speaker 1 (01:25:05):
Yeah, it's so hard to you know, hidden potential as
a kid and as we grow is so difficult because
if I was asked what I liked growing up now,
I can easily say that I think I was naturally
drawn towards the arts and design and philosophy, and I
can see it even more clearly now, but it would
have been really hard for someone I don't know. How

(01:25:26):
would you be better at spotting hidden potential in schools
and in young people earlier on, so that we can
kind of hopefully better guide and coach people as opposed
to have them become pre meds or complete a career
and then having to pivot.

Speaker 2 (01:25:39):
Well, I think the person who's best suited to see
your hidden potential is often the one who knows you best.
And I don't think we give teachers enough opportunity to
get to know kids. I love the research and looping
that I wrote about in the chapter on what we
can learn from countries like Finland and Estonia, But even
here in the US there's strong ev e it's from

(01:26:01):
multiple states with millions of students in elementary and middle
school that if they just happened to have the same
teacher for two years in a row, they achieve more
gains in math and rating, which is remarkable. And I
know there are tons of parents who are afraid of
this idea, like what if my kid gets stuck with
Professor Snape for two years instead of one that's the

(01:26:21):
end of the world. It turns out that not only
is it good for kids to have the same teacher
for multiple years, but that when kids are struggling and
teachers are struggling, they actually benefit more from the extended relationship.
And I don't think it's hard to unpack why this is.
I think when you know, when a teacher moves up
with a student, they don't lose all this information in
the handoff from one to the next. They understand the

(01:26:43):
student's strengths and opportunities for growth. They also have seen
this the distance that the student has traveled. And so
instead of just saying, well, like a new teacher, well
that student didn't shine in math, to say, wow, that
student was really behind in math and now is right
on track with the class. I think there's some hidden
potential there. I think every school on earth should let

(01:27:06):
kids have the same teacher for multiple years. And I
think it's not a huge effect in the data, but
I think it's a meaningful one.

Speaker 1 (01:27:12):
It is one of the biggest. I mean, even in
spiritual education and teaching and guidance, it's that's the only
way it works. Like the practices that my monk teachers
created for me were very different from what they created
for other students, because it was all about specific learning
and specific growth, and so some of the practices I
did were not normal for others, and some of the

(01:27:34):
practices other people did were not normal for me, because
you trusted that your teacher was getting to know you
better and therefore would create plans, whether some of that
included travel. For example, I would be asked to travel
back more to London to teach while I was a monk,
because they saw that that would be a useful skill
set for me, that would be a useful experience for

(01:27:55):
me of me going back to the country I was
from and having to connect there, and that wasn't part
of it everyone else's training. And so I've always been
a fan since my training in that way of having
the same teacher, and even till this day, I still
go back to the same monk teacher who knows me
much better and now he has like so much data

(01:28:15):
on me because you've known me since I was eighteen
years old, and so he has eighteen years of insight
of knowing me, and many of those years living together,
where his ability to say, oh my gosh, do you
remember when you used to be like this and this
challenge would trip you up? And look at you now,
and just that context is so useful to hear from
a student, like you're saying, like whether it's hey, you know,

(01:28:37):
you were struggling with math last year and last year
got C and this year got B. But I actually
noticed that, you know whatever, I think it's huge. I
actually think it's huge.

Speaker 2 (01:28:45):
And that's a great coda to the earlier point about
you want a coach to work themselves out of a job,
but then you want to be able to go back
to that coach at inflection points, yes, for a fresh
perspective or for somebody who has that continuity. And so
I think over the hope is that you don't rely
on that person day to day anymore, of course as
a crutch, but they are the person who I guess

(01:29:07):
has the most accurate mirror.

Speaker 1 (01:29:08):
Yeah. Absolutely, And that's at least from a Eastern philosophy
point of view. Education was always meant to be the guru,
as it would have been called at the time, and
a small enough class for the guru to get to
know the class well enough in order to spot hidden
potential and their psychophysical nature and their dharma word for

(01:29:29):
purpose in order to ignite that spark deeper, and that
requires a lot of training for the guru and an
openness from their students as well. But yeah, you're right,
it's not just choice as well. It's not just like, hey,
choose what you want. Yeah, it's beautiful. Thank you so much, Adam.
This has been amazing, Thanks to you. Always a joy.
I love how our conversations go from what's wrong with

(01:29:52):
the school system to why we're not idea promoting enough
all the way through to you know, how do we
choose what we need to work on? What is the weakness?
What are imperfections? And again it's all inside this book
called Hidden Potential The Science of Achieving Greater Things. Highly
recommend it from Adam. Will put the link in the
comments and the caption for you to get it. Thank
you so much, Adam for doing this. I appreciate you.

Speaker 2 (01:30:13):
Thank you Jay. It's been a joy and also a privilege.
And I think we've never spoken other than when we're recorded. Yes,
so we need to do a little bit more of this.

Speaker 1 (01:30:23):
I think I would love that and appreciate it and
welcome it. Thank you so thank you. Thanks Ana. If
you love this episode, you'll enjoy my interview with doctor
Daniel Ahman on how to change your life by changing
your brain. If we want a healthy mind, it actually
starts with a healthy brain.

Speaker 2 (01:30:42):
You know, I've had the blessing or the curse to
scam

Speaker 1 (01:30:46):
Over one thousand convicted felons and over one hundred murderers,
and their brands are very damage

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Adam Grant ON: Why Discomfort is the Key to Growth and Strategies for Unlocking Your Hidden Potential