March 7, 2024 • 43 mins
This week Scott is joined by Columbia business professor Dr. Shena Lyengar on how we make choices and innovate. Scott and Sheena discuss the essential tools of becoming a good chooser, the neuroscience of creativity and innovation, and how outsiders can come into a field and become an expert in it.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Look, I'm gonna fuck up at least one or two things.
Let's just take that as a given. A balanced life
includes fucking up. There should always be something fucked up.
In fact, if there isn't something fucked up, you're probably
leaving value on the table. You just want to make
sure that whatever's fucked up keeps moving. It's something different.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
Today, we welcome Sheena Iyngar to the show. Doctor Youngar
is in a clean professor of business in the Management
Department at Columbia Business School and a world expert on
the science of how we make choices and how we innovate.
I've been wanting to chat with doctor Jngar for a
while now, since we have so many overlapping areas of interest,
including our mutual interest in the science of creativity. I
(00:45):
really admire doctor Yengar as a blind Indian American woman
in academia. She intuitively used her own approach of thinking
bigger to find her calling and inspire others to do
the same. In this episode, we discussed the essential tools
for innovation and how to maximize potential. We also discuss
how non experts and outzeiders can learn just enough about
(01:06):
a field to innovate in it, and we discuss some
intriguing ideas such as the notion of the quote strategic copier. So,
without further ado, I bring you one of Colombia's most
popular professors, doctor Sheena i Angar Shina. Welcome to the
Psychology Podcast.
Speaker 1 (01:22):
Thank you, it's good to be here.
Speaker 2 (01:24):
Thank you so much for coming. Your legend a legend
in the field, and i've esteem professor in the Business
School at Columbia. Can you, and your own words, tell
our audience a bit about your main research focus.
Speaker 1 (01:40):
I have spent my entire career studying the answer to
one big question, how do we get the most from choice?
We're people that love choice, that love freedom. We all
know what the power are we supposed to give us right,
a better life, better everything, and yet we all struggle
(02:03):
and how do we how do we get the most
from it? And so I've looked at it through two lengths.
One is how do we become better picker and finders?
And that was my first book, The Art of Choosing.
And then after that I developed my second book, which
(02:23):
is really based on a methodology I created called Think Bigger,
which is designed to help you do two things. First,
how do you become a better picker and finder? And second,
how do you create meaningful choices when there's no known
solution to the problem at hand.
Speaker 2 (02:41):
Yeah, divergent thinking, you know. I love how you integrate
these two topics together, choice and creativity. And creativity, as
you know, is a big area of research of mind
and interest of mine. So that's wonderful. I really enjoyed
your new book, Think Bigger. I want to just double
click for a second on the choice aspect you know,
your first book. I'm a huge I'm a humanistic psychologist.
(03:04):
A lot of the humanistic psychologists, like Abraham Abraham Maslow
talked a lot, a lot about the importance of choosing wisely.
He often said, we need to, we need to, we
need to help people become good choosers. And what he
was referring to was choosing growth, you know, choosing that
growth option in our lives. Do you think people know
(03:25):
deep down fundamentally whether or not they're making a choice
that's good for their organism or is not good for
their organism from an evolutionary point of view.
Speaker 1 (03:36):
See, I think they have an opinion. Well, okay, let's
back up. I think that's a few things going on.
I think many people or almost everyone will, at some
point in their life, if not at multiple points in
their life, discover they don't know what they want, they
don't know what to choose, and they are genuinely buffuddled
(03:59):
by what to do. Then you have the times when
you feel like you ought to choose X, but you
don't really know if it's going to work out. Then
there's other times when, of course you know that whatever
you're doing is really not a good idea, but somehow
(04:23):
you can't help yourself, but you still do it, like
eating cake and not exercising all that other stuff.
Speaker 2 (04:29):
Yeah, so there's two. Do you separate these things out
from each other?
Speaker 1 (04:34):
I would separate the map?
Speaker 2 (04:35):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, No, that's good.
Speaker 1 (04:37):
I do think that they are separate categories.
Speaker 2 (04:39):
You know, yeah, I definitely agree. Well, how can people
become good better? How can people become better choosers? That's
a big topic. You wrote a whole book about it.
But is there any specific tangible advice you can just
give our audience before we get into the creativity.
Speaker 1 (04:55):
I would say the single best piece of advice is
to be choosy about choosing, particularly in this day and age.
You have to. You're not going to be able to
be good at choosing everything. You shouldn't try to optimize
on everything. You really just have to figure out on
a regular basis, what's the most important thing that you
(05:17):
need to make a choice on, because choice is always
effortful to choose well is effortful?
Speaker 2 (05:24):
Yeah, you're bringing to mind the maximizers versus satisfacers distinction.
Speaker 1 (05:30):
Yeah, so I'm not somebody who says, don't maximize. I'm
somebody who says, figure out, what are the things you
want to maximize on? Nice?
Speaker 2 (05:41):
Nice? Can we ever maximize anything?
Speaker 1 (05:46):
Yeah? Fully? Okay, Okay, well I think that's a subjective thing.
But yeah, you know, I I think the best choice
I ever made was the choice to study choice, and
I honestly don't think there was a better choice for me. No,
(06:07):
you might argue and a Nosina, you could have been
excellent at a bazillion other things, and so maybe you
could say I didn't really maximize, but I got what
everything I wanted from it.
Speaker 2 (06:20):
I feel the same way about psychology. Yeah, No, I
love that. Yeah, I mean there's just so many it
could be overwhelming. When you look at your Instagram feed
and ecy post after posts saying life is short, maximize
your day, you know, don't waste your life. You know,
(06:42):
it feels like you feel like a lot of pressure.
Speaker 1 (06:44):
And it's a lot of pressure, and they're trying to
tell you to do so many things, like I'm literally
supposed to wake up every morning, love myself, exercise, you
have to take care of my body, pay attention to
what I'm eating, meditate, uh, you know, buy things that
I love, only do things that I love and am
(07:05):
passionate about. Make sure I socialize, make sure I you know,
smell the flowers. And on top of that, I'm supposed
to develop core competencies. It's something. Now, how am I
going to have time for all of that?
Speaker 2 (07:16):
It's overwhelming.
Speaker 1 (07:19):
So that's why I say, look, I'm going to fuck
up at least one or two things. Let's just take
that as a given. A balanced life includes fucking up.
There should always be something fucked up. In fact, if
it's there isn't something fucked up, you're probably leaving value
on the table. You just want to make sure that
whatever's fucked up keeps moving. It's something different.
Speaker 2 (07:39):
So let's let's like connect some dots here with the
creativity work. I love this new book, Think Bigger the
Innovation method. What does it mean to think Bigger? Let's
start there, Let's uh, how do you conceptualize that?
Speaker 1 (07:54):
So it is literally based on neuroscience. It's how do
I think beyond the options put before me and create
something that's a meaningful option to solve for a problem
for which there isn't currently a solution. That's essentially what
I think Bigger is striving to do. And it's a methodology.
(08:15):
You know, we think that for the most part throughout
history we've had this view, and you know, philosophers and
religious figures certainly helped create this assumption, which is the
idea that you know, ideas come to us almost like magic. Right.
You're maybe you're sitting under a tree and some through
(08:35):
divine intervention, something comes to you, or you climb a
mountain and at the top divine intervention or God comes
down to you and speaks to you. And so we
have this view that it just happens, right, that it's
not really in your control. If you're going to get
a great idea, you know, maybe I can put myself
(08:56):
in certain places, maybe I can expose myself to some stuff,
but it's not something that's truly in my control. And
think Bigger really debunks that. It really says, no, there
actually is a very structured way in which you can
go about creating an idea. Go on, okay, okay, Well
(09:21):
so basically the most I mean it is a you know,
structured process that we can take people through. But its
simplest form, what it's saying to you is, when you
have a problem, you ask yourself first what exactly is
(09:43):
that problem? Define it in concrete terms, it's how do
I do X? Whatever X is? Right? And then it's saying, okay, well,
how has this problem been solved before? Right? And first
you obviously look at whatever is the available choice set,
(10:06):
and let's say that's dissatisfactory. And then you say, well,
how have analogous problems been solved in totally other domains
or spaces or industries. And now you say, okay, well,
given the way they solved it, does it give me
some insights on what I could combine together to create
(10:30):
a solution for me? At its core, that's all thing
Bigger is.
Speaker 2 (10:35):
I love it.
Speaker 1 (10:36):
I'm sure we come up with a set of six
steps of structured process, but at its core, that's all
it is. It's a structured way of thinking about what's
my problem? And then how am I going to search
for pieces of a solution that can be combined together
to give me an answer, to give me a new choice.
Speaker 2 (10:57):
We're going to go and and talk about some of
the spefic components of that in a second. Thank you
for that higher level overview. I know you have a
whole chapter on the creative brain. That's a topic very
near and dear to my heart as well. What do
you see as the most relevant findings from the latest
neuroscience of creativity?
Speaker 1 (11:19):
I would say Eric Kendell's work on how we form
thoughts is the most relevant. That essentially everything comes from
learning and memory. So if you think of your brain
as a giant Excel spreadsheet or a library system, you're
essentially encoding lots and lots of information bits, and you're
constantly encoding them and putting them in different shelves of
(11:40):
your mind. And you know, obviously you're also organizing it
and reorganizing it in different ways, so that anytime I
ask you a question, you're pulling different information bits from
different shelves and making new combinations that's essentially what you're
doing whenever you're engaging in an act of creativity. Now,
(12:02):
of course, when I say an act of creativity, I
think of it as something we're doing all the time,
So I'm not just focusing on the stuff we bucket
as creativity, like that piece of art or that that
song or that new piece of technology. Every sentence you
utter is an exercise in creativity.
Speaker 2 (12:23):
Yeah, because some people, you know, some of my students
are like, oh, I'm not creative? You know, am I
a creative person?
Speaker 1 (12:29):
Everybody's creative. I mean, unless you're having saying the same
sentence all day long, you're creative enough.
Speaker 2 (12:37):
Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah yeah yeah. Role may in the
courage to create, just to find creativity is the capacity
to bring into being something that did not exist before.
It's just that.
Speaker 1 (12:47):
Most of what we create, all of us, what we
create on a daily basis is you know, banal or
you know, just maybe it sucks. But that doesn't mean
we're not creating. We're all create And we think that
the ones who create the super amazing things that we
all talk about, whether it was Einstein or Steve Jobs,
(13:10):
we think that they have somehow had a special brain,
and that's I don't think that's true. I think there's
just a process that can be used by anybody to
come up with any sort of interesting solution if they're
willing to put in the work.
Speaker 2 (13:27):
Yeah, let's talk about some of that process. You have,
the kind of this first stage is finding the problem
in the first place and breaking it down. And that
seems to be very linked to your prior book, you know,
in Choice. You know, but how do you find the
problem that's right for you to solve out of all
the problems that exist in this world?
Speaker 1 (13:50):
So, as Einstein once said, if I had an hour
to save the planet, I would spend the first fifty
five minutes thinking about the problem, in the last five
minutes thinking about the solution. And the way I interpret
what he's saying is that, you know, any time I
have a problem, you know, what am I going to
(14:10):
do with the rest of my life? What am I
going to major in in college? You know? How am
I going to motivate myself? How am I going to
make myself happy? How am I going to save my company?
You know, take a bazillion problems that we regularly present ourselves.
You take that problem and you have to be willing
(14:31):
to really engage in the process of framing and reframing
that problem until it's concrete and solvable and one where
you know, is something you want to solve. Yeah, and
that makes sense for you to solve. So many times
we just pick up problems because you know, we should
(14:53):
solve it or it sounds good, but it's actually pretty vague.
Speaker 2 (14:57):
Yeah, that's for sure. Well, there are a lot of
problems that that humans don't know are problems. You know,
some people are really good at at creating problems. That's true,
and their equip put it that way before. What is
the benefit of thinking about it in terms of sub problems,
you know, and taking each problem apart, and it's to
(15:20):
its poll.
Speaker 1 (15:21):
Because most of the time, because we think about it
as a big problem and we don't break it down,
that's when it just is too overwhelming. And it's only
when you break it down. So I have so maybe
I should pick an example that would that make it
easier to talk about.
Speaker 2 (15:39):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (15:40):
So one of my favorite examples is, well, let's take
like Netflix. Everybody loves watching TV, so in the nineteen nineties,
most people might forget about this now, but in the
nineteen nineties, if you wanted to watch a movie at home,
you went to your local blockbuster and you reached a movie. Well,
(16:02):
and if you were late in bringing the movie back,
you paid a late fee. And so a guy named
Reed Hastings was like late in returning Apollo thirteen and
was jacking up his late fees and got really irritated
because he was going to get yelled at by his
wife about this. And so what's the problem? He ultimately
(16:26):
decides for himself. He goes, well, how do we create
home entertainment that's pleasant? Right? And so what was unpleasant
for him? He doesn't want to raise his bot to
go to the local blockbuster to return the movie. He
doesn't like this whole late fee thing. So you know,
(16:48):
is there a different financial law? So once and also
he wants a larger collection of movies and so what
does he do he? So those are so notice how
we broke down the problem, like how do we make
it pleasant? Well, how do I make it so that
I don't have to lift goat leave my couch? How
(17:12):
do I make it so that I can just pay
and not have to worry about late fees? Because that's
also annoying and unpleasant. And you know, how do I
make sure I have a really nice selection of movies
and it's not so dependent on whatever that local shop
happens to have. And so now he looks at solutions
for each of those. He says, well, how do I
(17:33):
get something without getting off my couch. Well, there was
this new thing that was going on back in the
nineties called Amazon, which was selling just books. Well, if
you could order books online, could you order a movie
online and it would come to you in the mail? Right?
(17:53):
And turns out, well, yeah, you could get a DVD
in the mail and it would come intact. H I
don't want to I don't want to pay late fees
because they were a different financial model that would still
allow us to make money. Well, back then, your membership
was becoming really popular. And what was your membership? You
(18:14):
paid a flat fee every month and you could use
it as much or as little as you want. What
about that for movies? Okay, Now, how do I make
sure the inventory is really big? Well, let's go back
to Amazon. If I put it online, you can just
(18:34):
order it in the mail. Then I could create my
warehouses where I would store the movies in places that
are not as expensive. And by the way, we often
forget that that's actually how Netflix began.
Speaker 2 (18:48):
Wow Yeah, I love following him on Twitter. He talks
about his early business model and how long it took
them before it finally took off. As well, they weren't
an instant success. H cool, great example, great example of Netflix.
(19:08):
So what how does this relate to the idea of
triangulating desire?
Speaker 1 (19:14):
So you take your problem, you break it down, and
usually I have people break it down to no more
than five main challenges. If you have a lot of
challenges for different problems, of course, but I want you
to pick your no more than five big priorities. If
you have more than five big priorities, then that's an
(19:36):
opportunity for you to take the problem you're trying to
solve and make it less big. So then before you
try to solve it, I have you identify, you know,
if you were to solve this problem, how should the
ideal solution feel like? That should look like, what should
(20:00):
it be, what it must needs? Must it accommodate? Now?
What should it feel like? And what should it feel like?
Not just to the customer, we often either tell you'd
only pay attention to what the entrepreneur wants or what
the customer wants. Well, have you look at it from
three perspectives? What does the entrepreneur want it to feel like?
(20:22):
What is the what would the customer want it to
feel like? And what would other stakeholders, whether they be
your shareholders, whether they be the government regulators, I mean,
what would their feelings be like? And so what you're
doing is you're coming up with these feelings, these most
important adjectives before you go into generating a solution, because
(20:45):
this is going to be your criteria for judgment, because
you could potentially generate a lot of different solutions to
your problem. And then how are you going to make
sure that you choose one that actually makes sense? You
don't want to just vote. If you vote, then it
just becomes a popularity context contest and they can actually
be biased in what they choose. So you want to
(21:06):
have that selection criteria set beforehand.
Speaker 2 (21:12):
How does that relate to the third eye test? Can
you use the third eye test to help you with that?
Speaker 1 (21:18):
What happens is you use what we call the big
picture scoring is what we use for the triangulation of desires.
So let's imagine after you go through the think Bigger process,
you've now generated our twenty twenty five thirty different solutions.
You use your big picture scoring to rank thumb and
so now you know, let's say you're top five, and
(21:40):
now you pick let's say your top one or two
or three, not more than three, and now you practice
the third eye. The third eye is a special way
of collecting feedback on your idea that enables you to
forecast how sticky that idea is likely to be. So
(22:00):
it's a cheap way to do it long before you
ever prototype.
Speaker 2 (22:05):
Where did you come up with the idea? Like, how
did that come about?
Speaker 1 (22:10):
The idea of what for third eye?
Speaker 2 (22:12):
Eye test?
Speaker 1 (22:18):
So that's a great question.
Speaker 2 (22:24):
Question.
Speaker 1 (22:25):
Yeah, it's funny, and nobody ever asked me that. So,
as a blind person, one of the things that I've
always done, which sometimes drives people nuts, but for me
was very intuitive and I just created it because it
was my own way of dealing with biases. Is I
(22:47):
discovered very early on as a blind person, if I
ask somebody, hey, what do you think of this outfit?
One person's gonna say, oh my god, I love it.
The other person's gonna whisper in my ear. You know, look,
you can count on me. I'm always going to tell
you the truth. But I really think this looks awful.
And what you would discover is that getting asking people
(23:11):
if they like something was really unhelpful. It was unoverwhelming,
It was confusing to people would have totally different opinions.
And so I began to realize that that was the
wrong question and that the better question to ask people
wasn't do you like this? The better question was to
(23:31):
ask what does this look like? What you know? When
I wear this, what image comes to mind? Or what
image am I presenting? What does it make you think of?
And then you know, one person says, oh, you look
really glamorous, or another person says, oh you look so warm,
(23:51):
another person says, oh, it looks so reserved. But what
I'm getting is what is the consensus in terms of
people's perception. Yeah, that now gives me the tools to understand,
you know what, whether I want to edit, how do
I want to edit? What part of it needs to
(24:13):
be edited? That was actually far more useful. So it
actually started just as a way for me to get
information on visuals that were, you know, tended to be
perceived as subjective, and it became a method that I created,
and then I realized that actually there was a lot
of science that was consistent with what I was doing,
(24:34):
because it turns out that if you ask, if you
there's a wonderful study done by Duncan Watts where they
take songs and they present them to young people and
they find and they put them in eight different worlds.
Two worlds you just hear a bunch of songs and
you give your ratings independently, and in the other six worlds,
(24:56):
you hear a song, but you also see how everybody
else rated it before you got there. And it turned
out that in those crowd situations, how a song was
going to be perceived was all over the map. It
was really uninformative. So and you got a little more
consistency in the independent worlds. But you know, that's one
(25:21):
of my favorite examples of how asking people do you
like or dislike? Is really not informative to know if
it's a good thing, you really want to know first
and foremost, how do people see it? What are they seeing?
Is it even even what they're seeing in line with
what I want them to see? Well, I might think
(25:44):
in my mind, what the outfit I just created is
warm and amazing, and yet other people see it as ow.
Speaker 2 (25:52):
She's so cash, Yeah, brilliant. I love how you like
you And only you could have come up with something
like that based on your own personal experiences. You're you're
a fascinating person. You're you're you're a blind Indian American woman,
one a top most popular professors at Columbia University. And
(26:20):
you know you have a creator. You're you're a creative being,
and that that informed your creative doing. And we've been
remiss not to not to make that linkage. So I'm
glad I asked the question.
Speaker 1 (26:31):
I asked, Oh, well, thank you, well, thank.
Speaker 2 (26:35):
You for answering it. Now were you were you born blind?
Speaker 1 (26:43):
I was born with a rare form of retinitis pigmentosa,
so I was born legally blind and then I lost
the rest of my vision while I was young.
Speaker 2 (26:51):
Okay, okay, So you've had to develop other pathways and
ways of of of of perceiving the world.
Speaker 1 (26:59):
And I would say that was part of what led
me to study choice and led me to create Think
Bigger because as someone growing up blind, the three words
I hated most where It's not possible.
Speaker 2 (27:11):
Yes, I hate that, hate that too.
Speaker 1 (27:13):
And I would hear that too much, so I would
always rebel.
Speaker 2 (27:20):
Yo, homegirl, I get it. I was in special education
as a kid and uh and always was told I
couldn't do things, and even though I couldn't go to
college and just you know, being able to prove people wrong.
There's a professor at the University Pennsylvania who studies the
underdog motivation and I will always love that research wonderful.
(27:43):
You know, in the in your book you talk about this,
this idea of the singular creative genius. Can you can
you talk a little about what where? What's the research
show on that?
Speaker 1 (27:53):
Is that?
Speaker 2 (27:53):
Is that a thing? Is that true? And also what
is a strategic copier?
Speaker 1 (27:59):
So we often think of like Einstein as a great genius,
and we think he must have had a special brain.
But in fact, you know, when he died, there was
some people that stole his brain, preserved it and compared
his brain against other people's brain. And we've never been
able to uncover any you know, real evidence that it
(28:22):
was any different from anybody else's brain. But what we
do know is that he spent quite a bit of
time as a patent officer. And when he was a
patent officer and burned, he reviewed about thousands of different patents,
and he even developed some patents like a patent for
a typewriter, a refrigerator, a camera, a really funky blouse
(28:46):
that I gather nobody would ever wear. But what he's
doing is he's collecting lots and lots of information bits
which are being added to the collection that's going into
his shelves of his mind, like we were talking about before.
And so if you think about what he ultimately does
(29:11):
in creating the law of relativity, if he's just got
more pieces to work with to be able to combine.
He himself described that time as a patent officer as
the time in which he hatched his most beautiful ideas.
So that brings me to your second question, which is
(29:32):
a strategic copier. So, as T. S. Eliot once said,
immature poets imitate and mature poets steal. And I actually,
you know, sometimes people laugh at that quote because it's
meant to be funny, but it's also quite profound as well,
(29:52):
right that in fact, it's when you're able to steal
a core concept from something like read Hastings did he
stole the core concept from Planet Fitness and said, well,
can I adapt it and use it for renting movies?
(30:16):
That's strategic copying and it's not like a it's not
like I P violation. I'm not talking about doing something illegal,
but it is understanding how to you know, essentially, take
what you got from somewhere else and figure out how
(30:37):
to adapt and edit edit it in a way that
works in your context.
Speaker 2 (30:43):
Well, what, so, what do you what do you make
of the notion of talent? Then certainly there there's something
that that the word talent means. What do you think
Einstein's talent was? Then?
Speaker 1 (30:58):
So this is going to perhaps be controversial for me
to say, but I think that to the extent that
you become brilliant, that X or Y or Z has
to do with how much how many information bits you
(31:20):
put in your brain and how much time you spent
really understanding how to manipulate those information bits in as
many different ways as you could. Now you could argue, well,
but you know, some people are musicians and some people
(31:40):
are mathematicians, and I would say yes, but I don't
think I think which one you choose to be has
more to do with your preferences than any innate skill.
You have a preference, and maybe that preference. They say
personality matters, and it probably does to some extent, But
(32:03):
I also think exposure matters when you're young. I don't
know how you disentangle those two. But let's just say
you have some preferences, and now those preferences drive you
know where you're going to invest more energy collecting more
information bits?
Speaker 2 (32:22):
Yeah, I mean I think that where that talent may
lie then, is your your inclination towards a certain symbol
system or a certain mode of information processing that you're
You're intrinsically motivated and enjoy manipulating and learning and synthesizing.
Speaker 1 (32:40):
Maybe sure, like you know, you might think I'm a
really smart person, right, you and I? But if you
ask me to write a song, make a drawing a.
Speaker 2 (32:55):
Bepathetic fair enough? This being smart zooming out to all
the sort of various aspects of your entire life. What
is the importance of choice for and really becoming a
good chooser for? How How wide does this go? Does
it cover relationships? Does it cover your careers, your identities?
(33:16):
You know, what's the zoomed out version of this? Look like.
Speaker 1 (33:22):
I mean, choice is the only tool we have as
humans that enables us to go from who we are
today to whom we want to be tomorrow. Right, So
that's true across the board. Relationships. You know, you can
choose everything from the little things like what you wear,
what you eat, so the big things, what career you undertake,
(33:46):
whom you marry, how you live, how you die. So
it's certainly the thing that you're doing consciously and subconsciously,
you know, every single minute of your life. But do
I think you should obsess over every choice? No, I
(34:08):
think that's suboptimal. Do I think you should pay more
attention to identifying what are the choices that are really
important that will really affect your life? Yes? I think
you want to think about, you know, what are the
things that are most important. So when you said relationships,
you know, like one of the really important choices you're
(34:31):
going to make in life is who you're gonna marry,
let's say, or spend a lot of time with. It
doesn't have to even be marriage. Right now, if you
were to obsess over every little thing that would be
good for you, if that person did or didn't do,
if you'd be paralyzed. But you do need to be
(34:53):
able to say, look, what are the things that are
let's say the three to five most important things, and
to think thoughtfully about that because you want to be
able to get those things and be able to be
clear right about it. You're never going to be able
to optimize across twenty thirty things. You could optimize across three,
(35:17):
maybe five. Same thing is true for your career.
Speaker 2 (35:23):
Well, let me I want to follow up for a
second on you saying that even though you're super smart,
there are certain demeans that if you entered them, you
wouldn't be too good at. I want to link that
to this very interesting section of your book where you
talk about how non experts and outsiders can orange just
enough about a field to create an innovation for it.
(35:44):
It's possible that your lack of expertise in those other
fields could actually make you innovate in them in some way.
I'm not counting you out in music and art, is
what I'm saying.
Speaker 1 (35:57):
Sure it can help it. Yes, you know exactly what
you're looking for and then can understand how to manipulate it. Right. So,
for example, I am not somebody I'm terrible of knowing
(36:18):
even musicians, right, But I could understand the story of
Paul McCartney and how he created the song yesterday, and
that that was an important story because it showed you
something really important about the third eye. I learn things
(36:42):
from art and going on art gallery tours even though
I am blind because in the descriptions, because I'm not. Yeah,
I thinking about, oh, most art fits in this tradition,
which builds on glovety blood tradition, which build one blowdy
blood tradition. No, as a blind person and an somebody
(37:04):
who stood his innovation. When I look at art, I'm
seeing the pieces that are coming together and how this
is going to affect the future in domains outside of art.
So that's why I'm able to talk about things like
how Picasso came up with his idea or what's the
difference between why Brock versus Picasso became more influential because
(37:28):
I'm able to look at it through a different lens.
Speaker 2 (37:33):
Yeah, that can be yea very valuable, But I'm.
Speaker 1 (37:36):
By no means an art expert or a music expert.
Speaker 2 (37:40):
Yeah, well yeah, but your your point is that non
experts can still contribute to a field. So I'm not
kinding you out. Thank you, You're welcome. I want to
Anthonay's interview talking about one of my favorite scientific papers
ever published which you and you are a co author
(38:01):
on it. It's called positive more than unbiased self perceptions
increased subjective authenticity. I'm really interested in this topic of
authenticity and the idea that I've called it the authenticity bias,
where we tend to think the real me is really
the positive signs of ourselves. Can you unpack a little
(38:22):
bit about what that research study found and some of
the implications of it.
Speaker 1 (38:27):
So this is a study actually that my PhD student
who's now faculty at Berkeley, Erica Bailey. That's her main topic.
She's passionate about authenticity and we've find in lots of
studies both included in that paper, and then there's another
paper right now under review. Essentially, when we do things
(38:48):
that you might say are fake, you know, like actually,
we currently have a study under review where we look
at people that do different cosmetic procedures, you know, like
botox fillers, et cetera. It turns out that even though
they're doing this thing which we might say is you know, artificial,
(39:09):
they the people who do it actually afterwards feel more authentic,
and they feel more authentic because it is enabling them
to be more in line with what they perceive to be.
They're more unvarnished best self, ideal self before it got tainted,
(39:31):
for example. And so essentially, we have a number of
studies that show that when when we are able to
identify or be seen in the ways that bring out
our better qualities, you know, that's when we feel most authentic.
(39:51):
One of my favorite quotes is from Dolly Parton where
she says, you know, everything about me might be fake,
but I'm really real.
Speaker 2 (40:01):
Well that you just quote a dollar part is No,
that's wonderful. This research, I mean, this is a really
rich series of studies and we can't get in all
the findings, but one of the findings really interesting is
that this positivity bias that you're describing does not extend
to other rated authenticity.
Speaker 1 (40:19):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (40:20):
Can you talk a little bit about that.
Speaker 1 (40:21):
Well, when when we have positive things about ourselves, we
see ourselves as that means we're authentic, but we don't,
you know, when it's other people who are doing things
that are positive, we don't see them as being We
don't give them the same brownie points of authenticity.
Speaker 2 (40:42):
M what does that make us? Does that make us hypocrites?
Speaker 1 (40:50):
Well?
Speaker 2 (40:50):
What does that mean about humans? What does that mean
about humans?
Speaker 1 (40:54):
I mean, I think we're a bit suspicious, right if
somebody else seems too good, then we you know, don't
always know if there we can trust it. Also, the
other thing that's very interesting is even when we are
being authentic and know that we're not faking it, even
(41:17):
though we see ourselves as authentic, that doesn't mean that
others will see us as authentic, which we have a
hard time wrapping our heads around because we believe that
since we're being authentic, obviously it'll be self evident to
other people. But it's actually not so. I think what
I take away is that authenticity is a social construction.
(41:41):
We think of authenticity as being purely self generated and
self defined, but it's actually not true. To the extent.
That you're authentic depends on both your perception of you
and my perception of you, and it's only when there's
(42:01):
alignment between those two perceptions that you're authentic.
Speaker 2 (42:06):
Yeah, so the whole notion of the real me is
a social construction as well. Then there's no real me. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (42:13):
Yeah, yeah, it's just like the third eye test. There's
no real idea that exists until it exists in a
way that both you and I understand what it is.
Speaker 2 (42:26):
If the tree is not perceived in the forest, doesn't exist,
it's interesting question. Yeah. So the takeaway from that paper said,
taking together these findings suggest that being quote unreal through
positive self illusions can paradoxically make one feel more real.
I just find that I find that that research so
(42:46):
fascinating and kudos, big kudos to her. Oh, thank you
and to you and your student on that really terrific work. Shina,
thank you so much for your time today and being
on my podcast. And I hope our listeners have learned
how to make better choice is be more creative and
construct a version of their own self perceived authenticity that
(43:07):
makes them happier in life. So thank you, Shea, thank you,
Take care you too.
Look, I'm gonna fuck up at least one or two things.
Let's just take that as a given. A balanced life
includes fucking up. There should always be something fucked up.
In fact, if there isn't something fucked up, you're probably
leaving value on the table. You just want to make
sure that whatever's fucked up keeps moving. It's something different.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
Today, we welcome Sheena Iyngar to the show. Doctor Youngar
is in a clean professor of business in the Management
Department at Columbia Business School and a world expert on
the science of how we make choices and how we innovate.
I've been wanting to chat with doctor Jngar for a
while now, since we have so many overlapping areas of interest,
including our mutual interest in the science of creativity. I
(00:45):
really admire doctor Yengar as a blind Indian American woman
in academia. She intuitively used her own approach of thinking
bigger to find her calling and inspire others to do
the same. In this episode, we discussed the essential tools
for innovation and how to maximize potential. We also discuss
how non experts and outzeiders can learn just enough about
(01:06):
a field to innovate in it, and we discuss some
intriguing ideas such as the notion of the quote strategic copier. So,
without further ado, I bring you one of Colombia's most
popular professors, doctor Sheena i Angar Shina. Welcome to the
Psychology Podcast.
Speaker 1 (01:22):
Thank you, it's good to be here.
Speaker 2 (01:24):
Thank you so much for coming. Your legend a legend
in the field, and i've esteem professor in the Business
School at Columbia. Can you, and your own words, tell
our audience a bit about your main research focus.
Speaker 1 (01:40):
I have spent my entire career studying the answer to
one big question, how do we get the most from choice?
We're people that love choice, that love freedom. We all
know what the power are we supposed to give us right,
a better life, better everything, and yet we all struggle
(02:03):
and how do we how do we get the most
from it? And so I've looked at it through two lengths.
One is how do we become better picker and finders?
And that was my first book, The Art of Choosing.
And then after that I developed my second book, which
(02:23):
is really based on a methodology I created called Think Bigger,
which is designed to help you do two things. First,
how do you become a better picker and finder? And second,
how do you create meaningful choices when there's no known
solution to the problem at hand.
Speaker 2 (02:41):
Yeah, divergent thinking, you know. I love how you integrate
these two topics together, choice and creativity. And creativity, as
you know, is a big area of research of mind
and interest of mine. So that's wonderful. I really enjoyed
your new book, Think Bigger. I want to just double
click for a second on the choice aspect you know,
your first book. I'm a huge I'm a humanistic psychologist.
(03:04):
A lot of the humanistic psychologists, like Abraham Abraham Maslow
talked a lot, a lot about the importance of choosing wisely.
He often said, we need to, we need to, we
need to help people become good choosers. And what he
was referring to was choosing growth, you know, choosing that
growth option in our lives. Do you think people know
(03:25):
deep down fundamentally whether or not they're making a choice
that's good for their organism or is not good for
their organism from an evolutionary point of view.
Speaker 1 (03:36):
See, I think they have an opinion. Well, okay, let's
back up. I think that's a few things going on.
I think many people or almost everyone will, at some
point in their life, if not at multiple points in
their life, discover they don't know what they want, they
don't know what to choose, and they are genuinely buffuddled
(03:59):
by what to do. Then you have the times when
you feel like you ought to choose X, but you
don't really know if it's going to work out. Then
there's other times when, of course you know that whatever
you're doing is really not a good idea, but somehow
(04:23):
you can't help yourself, but you still do it, like
eating cake and not exercising all that other stuff.
Speaker 2 (04:29):
Yeah, so there's two. Do you separate these things out
from each other?
Speaker 1 (04:34):
I would separate the map?
Speaker 2 (04:35):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, No, that's good.
Speaker 1 (04:37):
I do think that they are separate categories.
Speaker 2 (04:39):
You know, yeah, I definitely agree. Well, how can people
become good better? How can people become better choosers? That's
a big topic. You wrote a whole book about it.
But is there any specific tangible advice you can just
give our audience before we get into the creativity.
Speaker 1 (04:55):
I would say the single best piece of advice is
to be choosy about choosing, particularly in this day and age.
You have to. You're not going to be able to
be good at choosing everything. You shouldn't try to optimize
on everything. You really just have to figure out on
a regular basis, what's the most important thing that you
(05:17):
need to make a choice on, because choice is always
effortful to choose well is effortful?
Speaker 2 (05:24):
Yeah, you're bringing to mind the maximizers versus satisfacers distinction.
Speaker 1 (05:30):
Yeah, so I'm not somebody who says, don't maximize. I'm
somebody who says, figure out, what are the things you
want to maximize on? Nice?
Speaker 2 (05:41):
Nice? Can we ever maximize anything?
Speaker 1 (05:46):
Yeah? Fully? Okay, Okay, well I think that's a subjective thing.
But yeah, you know, I I think the best choice
I ever made was the choice to study choice, and
I honestly don't think there was a better choice for me. No,
(06:07):
you might argue and a Nosina, you could have been
excellent at a bazillion other things, and so maybe you
could say I didn't really maximize, but I got what
everything I wanted from it.
Speaker 2 (06:20):
I feel the same way about psychology. Yeah, No, I
love that. Yeah, I mean there's just so many it
could be overwhelming. When you look at your Instagram feed
and ecy post after posts saying life is short, maximize
your day, you know, don't waste your life. You know,
(06:42):
it feels like you feel like a lot of pressure.
Speaker 1 (06:44):
And it's a lot of pressure, and they're trying to
tell you to do so many things, like I'm literally
supposed to wake up every morning, love myself, exercise, you
have to take care of my body, pay attention to
what I'm eating, meditate, uh, you know, buy things that
I love, only do things that I love and am
(07:05):
passionate about. Make sure I socialize, make sure I you know,
smell the flowers. And on top of that, I'm supposed
to develop core competencies. It's something. Now, how am I
going to have time for all of that?
Speaker 2 (07:16):
It's overwhelming.
Speaker 1 (07:19):
So that's why I say, look, I'm going to fuck
up at least one or two things. Let's just take
that as a given. A balanced life includes fucking up.
There should always be something fucked up. In fact, if
it's there isn't something fucked up, you're probably leaving value
on the table. You just want to make sure that
whatever's fucked up keeps moving. It's something different.
Speaker 2 (07:39):
So let's let's like connect some dots here with the
creativity work. I love this new book, Think Bigger the
Innovation method. What does it mean to think Bigger? Let's
start there, Let's uh, how do you conceptualize that?
Speaker 1 (07:54):
So it is literally based on neuroscience. It's how do
I think beyond the options put before me and create
something that's a meaningful option to solve for a problem
for which there isn't currently a solution. That's essentially what
I think Bigger is striving to do. And it's a methodology.
(08:15):
You know, we think that for the most part throughout
history we've had this view, and you know, philosophers and
religious figures certainly helped create this assumption, which is the
idea that you know, ideas come to us almost like magic. Right.
You're maybe you're sitting under a tree and some through
(08:35):
divine intervention, something comes to you, or you climb a
mountain and at the top divine intervention or God comes
down to you and speaks to you. And so we
have this view that it just happens, right, that it's
not really in your control. If you're going to get
a great idea, you know, maybe I can put myself
(08:56):
in certain places, maybe I can expose myself to some stuff,
but it's not something that's truly in my control. And
think Bigger really debunks that. It really says, no, there
actually is a very structured way in which you can
go about creating an idea. Go on, okay, okay, Well
(09:21):
so basically the most I mean it is a you know,
structured process that we can take people through. But its
simplest form, what it's saying to you is, when you
have a problem, you ask yourself first what exactly is
(09:43):
that problem? Define it in concrete terms, it's how do
I do X? Whatever X is? Right? And then it's saying, okay, well,
how has this problem been solved before? Right? And first
you obviously look at whatever is the available choice set,
(10:06):
and let's say that's dissatisfactory. And then you say, well,
how have analogous problems been solved in totally other domains
or spaces or industries. And now you say, okay, well,
given the way they solved it, does it give me
some insights on what I could combine together to create
(10:30):
a solution for me? At its core, that's all thing
Bigger is.
Speaker 2 (10:35):
I love it.
Speaker 1 (10:36):
I'm sure we come up with a set of six
steps of structured process, but at its core, that's all
it is. It's a structured way of thinking about what's
my problem? And then how am I going to search
for pieces of a solution that can be combined together
to give me an answer, to give me a new choice.
Speaker 2 (10:57):
We're going to go and and talk about some of
the spefic components of that in a second. Thank you
for that higher level overview. I know you have a
whole chapter on the creative brain. That's a topic very
near and dear to my heart as well. What do
you see as the most relevant findings from the latest
neuroscience of creativity?
Speaker 1 (11:19):
I would say Eric Kendell's work on how we form
thoughts is the most relevant. That essentially everything comes from
learning and memory. So if you think of your brain
as a giant Excel spreadsheet or a library system, you're
essentially encoding lots and lots of information bits, and you're
constantly encoding them and putting them in different shelves of
(11:40):
your mind. And you know, obviously you're also organizing it
and reorganizing it in different ways, so that anytime I
ask you a question, you're pulling different information bits from
different shelves and making new combinations that's essentially what you're
doing whenever you're engaging in an act of creativity. Now,
(12:02):
of course, when I say an act of creativity, I
think of it as something we're doing all the time,
So I'm not just focusing on the stuff we bucket
as creativity, like that piece of art or that that
song or that new piece of technology. Every sentence you
utter is an exercise in creativity.
Speaker 2 (12:23):
Yeah, because some people, you know, some of my students
are like, oh, I'm not creative? You know, am I
a creative person?
Speaker 1 (12:29):
Everybody's creative. I mean, unless you're having saying the same
sentence all day long, you're creative enough.
Speaker 2 (12:37):
Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah yeah yeah. Role may in the
courage to create, just to find creativity is the capacity
to bring into being something that did not exist before.
It's just that.
Speaker 1 (12:47):
Most of what we create, all of us, what we
create on a daily basis is you know, banal or
you know, just maybe it sucks. But that doesn't mean
we're not creating. We're all create And we think that
the ones who create the super amazing things that we
all talk about, whether it was Einstein or Steve Jobs,
(13:10):
we think that they have somehow had a special brain,
and that's I don't think that's true. I think there's
just a process that can be used by anybody to
come up with any sort of interesting solution if they're
willing to put in the work.
Speaker 2 (13:27):
Yeah, let's talk about some of that process. You have,
the kind of this first stage is finding the problem
in the first place and breaking it down. And that
seems to be very linked to your prior book, you know,
in Choice. You know, but how do you find the
problem that's right for you to solve out of all
the problems that exist in this world?
Speaker 1 (13:50):
So, as Einstein once said, if I had an hour
to save the planet, I would spend the first fifty
five minutes thinking about the problem, in the last five
minutes thinking about the solution. And the way I interpret
what he's saying is that, you know, any time I
have a problem, you know, what am I going to
(14:10):
do with the rest of my life? What am I
going to major in in college? You know? How am
I going to motivate myself? How am I going to
make myself happy? How am I going to save my company?
You know, take a bazillion problems that we regularly present ourselves.
You take that problem and you have to be willing
(14:31):
to really engage in the process of framing and reframing
that problem until it's concrete and solvable and one where
you know, is something you want to solve. Yeah, and
that makes sense for you to solve. So many times
we just pick up problems because you know, we should
(14:53):
solve it or it sounds good, but it's actually pretty vague.
Speaker 2 (14:57):
Yeah, that's for sure. Well, there are a lot of
problems that that humans don't know are problems. You know,
some people are really good at at creating problems. That's true,
and their equip put it that way before. What is
the benefit of thinking about it in terms of sub problems,
you know, and taking each problem apart, and it's to
(15:20):
its poll.
Speaker 1 (15:21):
Because most of the time, because we think about it
as a big problem and we don't break it down,
that's when it just is too overwhelming. And it's only
when you break it down. So I have so maybe
I should pick an example that would that make it
easier to talk about.
Speaker 2 (15:39):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (15:40):
So one of my favorite examples is, well, let's take
like Netflix. Everybody loves watching TV, so in the nineteen nineties,
most people might forget about this now, but in the
nineteen nineties, if you wanted to watch a movie at home,
you went to your local blockbuster and you reached a movie. Well,
(16:02):
and if you were late in bringing the movie back,
you paid a late fee. And so a guy named
Reed Hastings was like late in returning Apollo thirteen and
was jacking up his late fees and got really irritated
because he was going to get yelled at by his
wife about this. And so what's the problem? He ultimately
(16:26):
decides for himself. He goes, well, how do we create
home entertainment that's pleasant? Right? And so what was unpleasant
for him? He doesn't want to raise his bot to
go to the local blockbuster to return the movie. He
doesn't like this whole late fee thing. So you know,
(16:48):
is there a different financial law? So once and also
he wants a larger collection of movies and so what
does he do he? So those are so notice how
we broke down the problem, like how do we make
it pleasant? Well, how do I make it so that
I don't have to lift goat leave my couch? How
(17:12):
do I make it so that I can just pay
and not have to worry about late fees? Because that's
also annoying and unpleasant. And you know, how do I
make sure I have a really nice selection of movies
and it's not so dependent on whatever that local shop
happens to have. And so now he looks at solutions
for each of those. He says, well, how do I
(17:33):
get something without getting off my couch. Well, there was
this new thing that was going on back in the
nineties called Amazon, which was selling just books. Well, if
you could order books online, could you order a movie
online and it would come to you in the mail? Right?
(17:53):
And turns out, well, yeah, you could get a DVD
in the mail and it would come intact. H I
don't want to I don't want to pay late fees
because they were a different financial model that would still
allow us to make money. Well, back then, your membership
was becoming really popular. And what was your membership? You
(18:14):
paid a flat fee every month and you could use
it as much or as little as you want. What
about that for movies? Okay, Now, how do I make
sure the inventory is really big? Well, let's go back
to Amazon. If I put it online, you can just
(18:34):
order it in the mail. Then I could create my
warehouses where I would store the movies in places that
are not as expensive. And by the way, we often
forget that that's actually how Netflix began.
Speaker 2 (18:48):
Wow Yeah, I love following him on Twitter. He talks
about his early business model and how long it took
them before it finally took off. As well, they weren't
an instant success. H cool, great example, great example of Netflix.
(19:08):
So what how does this relate to the idea of
triangulating desire?
Speaker 1 (19:14):
So you take your problem, you break it down, and
usually I have people break it down to no more
than five main challenges. If you have a lot of
challenges for different problems, of course, but I want you
to pick your no more than five big priorities. If
you have more than five big priorities, then that's an
(19:36):
opportunity for you to take the problem you're trying to
solve and make it less big. So then before you
try to solve it, I have you identify, you know,
if you were to solve this problem, how should the
ideal solution feel like? That should look like, what should
(20:00):
it be, what it must needs? Must it accommodate? Now?
What should it feel like? And what should it feel like?
Not just to the customer, we often either tell you'd
only pay attention to what the entrepreneur wants or what
the customer wants. Well, have you look at it from
three perspectives? What does the entrepreneur want it to feel like?
(20:22):
What is the what would the customer want it to
feel like? And what would other stakeholders, whether they be
your shareholders, whether they be the government regulators, I mean,
what would their feelings be like? And so what you're
doing is you're coming up with these feelings, these most
important adjectives before you go into generating a solution, because
(20:45):
this is going to be your criteria for judgment, because
you could potentially generate a lot of different solutions to
your problem. And then how are you going to make
sure that you choose one that actually makes sense? You
don't want to just vote. If you vote, then it
just becomes a popularity context contest and they can actually
be biased in what they choose. So you want to
(21:06):
have that selection criteria set beforehand.
Speaker 2 (21:12):
How does that relate to the third eye test? Can
you use the third eye test to help you with that?
Speaker 1 (21:18):
What happens is you use what we call the big
picture scoring is what we use for the triangulation of desires.
So let's imagine after you go through the think Bigger process,
you've now generated our twenty twenty five thirty different solutions.
You use your big picture scoring to rank thumb and
so now you know, let's say you're top five, and
(21:40):
now you pick let's say your top one or two
or three, not more than three, and now you practice
the third eye. The third eye is a special way
of collecting feedback on your idea that enables you to
forecast how sticky that idea is likely to be. So
(22:00):
it's a cheap way to do it long before you
ever prototype.
Speaker 2 (22:05):
Where did you come up with the idea? Like, how
did that come about?
Speaker 1 (22:10):
The idea of what for third eye?
Speaker 2 (22:12):
Eye test?
Speaker 1 (22:18):
So that's a great question.
Speaker 2 (22:24):
Question.
Speaker 1 (22:25):
Yeah, it's funny, and nobody ever asked me that. So,
as a blind person, one of the things that I've
always done, which sometimes drives people nuts, but for me
was very intuitive and I just created it because it
was my own way of dealing with biases. Is I
(22:47):
discovered very early on as a blind person, if I
ask somebody, hey, what do you think of this outfit?
One person's gonna say, oh my god, I love it.
The other person's gonna whisper in my ear. You know, look,
you can count on me. I'm always going to tell
you the truth. But I really think this looks awful.
And what you would discover is that getting asking people
(23:11):
if they like something was really unhelpful. It was unoverwhelming,
It was confusing to people would have totally different opinions.
And so I began to realize that that was the
wrong question and that the better question to ask people
wasn't do you like this? The better question was to
(23:31):
ask what does this look like? What you know? When
I wear this, what image comes to mind? Or what
image am I presenting? What does it make you think of?
And then you know, one person says, oh, you look
really glamorous, or another person says, oh you look so warm,
(23:51):
another person says, oh, it looks so reserved. But what
I'm getting is what is the consensus in terms of
people's perception. Yeah, that now gives me the tools to understand,
you know what, whether I want to edit, how do
I want to edit? What part of it needs to
(24:13):
be edited? That was actually far more useful. So it
actually started just as a way for me to get
information on visuals that were, you know, tended to be
perceived as subjective, and it became a method that I created,
and then I realized that actually there was a lot
of science that was consistent with what I was doing,
(24:34):
because it turns out that if you ask, if you
there's a wonderful study done by Duncan Watts where they
take songs and they present them to young people and
they find and they put them in eight different worlds.
Two worlds you just hear a bunch of songs and
you give your ratings independently, and in the other six worlds,
(24:56):
you hear a song, but you also see how everybody
else rated it before you got there. And it turned
out that in those crowd situations, how a song was
going to be perceived was all over the map. It
was really uninformative. So and you got a little more
consistency in the independent worlds. But you know, that's one
(25:21):
of my favorite examples of how asking people do you
like or dislike? Is really not informative to know if
it's a good thing, you really want to know first
and foremost, how do people see it? What are they seeing?
Is it even even what they're seeing in line with
what I want them to see? Well, I might think
(25:44):
in my mind, what the outfit I just created is
warm and amazing, and yet other people see it as ow.
Speaker 2 (25:52):
She's so cash, Yeah, brilliant. I love how you like
you And only you could have come up with something
like that based on your own personal experiences. You're you're
a fascinating person. You're you're you're a blind Indian American woman,
one a top most popular professors at Columbia University. And
(26:20):
you know you have a creator. You're you're a creative being,
and that that informed your creative doing. And we've been
remiss not to not to make that linkage. So I'm
glad I asked the question.
Speaker 1 (26:31):
I asked, Oh, well, thank you, well, thank.
Speaker 2 (26:35):
You for answering it. Now were you were you born blind?
Speaker 1 (26:43):
I was born with a rare form of retinitis pigmentosa,
so I was born legally blind and then I lost
the rest of my vision while I was young.
Speaker 2 (26:51):
Okay, okay, So you've had to develop other pathways and
ways of of of of perceiving the world.
Speaker 1 (26:59):
And I would say that was part of what led
me to study choice and led me to create Think
Bigger because as someone growing up blind, the three words
I hated most where It's not possible.
Speaker 2 (27:11):
Yes, I hate that, hate that too.
Speaker 1 (27:13):
And I would hear that too much, so I would
always rebel.
Speaker 2 (27:20):
Yo, homegirl, I get it. I was in special education
as a kid and uh and always was told I
couldn't do things, and even though I couldn't go to
college and just you know, being able to prove people wrong.
There's a professor at the University Pennsylvania who studies the
underdog motivation and I will always love that research wonderful.
(27:43):
You know, in the in your book you talk about this,
this idea of the singular creative genius. Can you can
you talk a little about what where? What's the research
show on that?
Speaker 1 (27:53):
Is that?
Speaker 2 (27:53):
Is that a thing? Is that true? And also what
is a strategic copier?
Speaker 1 (27:59):
So we often think of like Einstein as a great genius,
and we think he must have had a special brain.
But in fact, you know, when he died, there was
some people that stole his brain, preserved it and compared
his brain against other people's brain. And we've never been
able to uncover any you know, real evidence that it
(28:22):
was any different from anybody else's brain. But what we
do know is that he spent quite a bit of
time as a patent officer. And when he was a
patent officer and burned, he reviewed about thousands of different patents,
and he even developed some patents like a patent for
a typewriter, a refrigerator, a camera, a really funky blouse
(28:46):
that I gather nobody would ever wear. But what he's
doing is he's collecting lots and lots of information bits
which are being added to the collection that's going into
his shelves of his mind, like we were talking about before.
And so if you think about what he ultimately does
(29:11):
in creating the law of relativity, if he's just got
more pieces to work with to be able to combine.
He himself described that time as a patent officer as
the time in which he hatched his most beautiful ideas.
So that brings me to your second question, which is
(29:32):
a strategic copier. So, as T. S. Eliot once said,
immature poets imitate and mature poets steal. And I actually,
you know, sometimes people laugh at that quote because it's
meant to be funny, but it's also quite profound as well,
(29:52):
right that in fact, it's when you're able to steal
a core concept from something like read Hastings did he
stole the core concept from Planet Fitness and said, well,
can I adapt it and use it for renting movies?
(30:16):
That's strategic copying and it's not like a it's not
like I P violation. I'm not talking about doing something illegal,
but it is understanding how to you know, essentially, take
what you got from somewhere else and figure out how
(30:37):
to adapt and edit edit it in a way that
works in your context.
Speaker 2 (30:43):
Well, what, so, what do you what do you make
of the notion of talent? Then certainly there there's something
that that the word talent means. What do you think
Einstein's talent was? Then?
Speaker 1 (30:58):
So this is going to perhaps be controversial for me
to say, but I think that to the extent that
you become brilliant, that X or Y or Z has
to do with how much how many information bits you
(31:20):
put in your brain and how much time you spent
really understanding how to manipulate those information bits in as
many different ways as you could. Now you could argue, well,
but you know, some people are musicians and some people
(31:40):
are mathematicians, and I would say yes, but I don't
think I think which one you choose to be has
more to do with your preferences than any innate skill.
You have a preference, and maybe that preference. They say
personality matters, and it probably does to some extent, But
(32:03):
I also think exposure matters when you're young. I don't
know how you disentangle those two. But let's just say
you have some preferences, and now those preferences drive you
know where you're going to invest more energy collecting more
information bits?
Speaker 2 (32:22):
Yeah, I mean I think that where that talent may
lie then, is your your inclination towards a certain symbol
system or a certain mode of information processing that you're
You're intrinsically motivated and enjoy manipulating and learning and synthesizing.
Speaker 1 (32:40):
Maybe sure, like you know, you might think I'm a
really smart person, right, you and I? But if you
ask me to write a song, make a drawing a.
Speaker 2 (32:55):
Bepathetic fair enough? This being smart zooming out to all
the sort of various aspects of your entire life. What
is the importance of choice for and really becoming a
good chooser for? How How wide does this go? Does
it cover relationships? Does it cover your careers, your identities?
(33:16):
You know, what's the zoomed out version of this? Look like.
Speaker 1 (33:22):
I mean, choice is the only tool we have as
humans that enables us to go from who we are
today to whom we want to be tomorrow. Right, So
that's true across the board. Relationships. You know, you can
choose everything from the little things like what you wear,
what you eat, so the big things, what career you undertake,
(33:46):
whom you marry, how you live, how you die. So
it's certainly the thing that you're doing consciously and subconsciously,
you know, every single minute of your life. But do
I think you should obsess over every choice? No, I
(34:08):
think that's suboptimal. Do I think you should pay more
attention to identifying what are the choices that are really
important that will really affect your life? Yes? I think
you want to think about, you know, what are the
things that are most important. So when you said relationships,
you know, like one of the really important choices you're
(34:31):
going to make in life is who you're gonna marry,
let's say, or spend a lot of time with. It
doesn't have to even be marriage. Right now, if you
were to obsess over every little thing that would be
good for you, if that person did or didn't do,
if you'd be paralyzed. But you do need to be
(34:53):
able to say, look, what are the things that are
let's say the three to five most important things, and
to think thoughtfully about that because you want to be
able to get those things and be able to be
clear right about it. You're never going to be able
to optimize across twenty thirty things. You could optimize across three,
(35:17):
maybe five. Same thing is true for your career.
Speaker 2 (35:23):
Well, let me I want to follow up for a
second on you saying that even though you're super smart,
there are certain demeans that if you entered them, you
wouldn't be too good at. I want to link that
to this very interesting section of your book where you
talk about how non experts and outsiders can orange just
enough about a field to create an innovation for it.
(35:44):
It's possible that your lack of expertise in those other
fields could actually make you innovate in them in some way.
I'm not counting you out in music and art, is
what I'm saying.
Speaker 1 (35:57):
Sure it can help it. Yes, you know exactly what
you're looking for and then can understand how to manipulate it. Right. So,
for example, I am not somebody I'm terrible of knowing
(36:18):
even musicians, right, But I could understand the story of
Paul McCartney and how he created the song yesterday, and
that that was an important story because it showed you
something really important about the third eye. I learn things
(36:42):
from art and going on art gallery tours even though
I am blind because in the descriptions, because I'm not. Yeah,
I thinking about, oh, most art fits in this tradition,
which builds on glovety blood tradition, which build one blowdy
blood tradition. No, as a blind person and an somebody
(37:04):
who stood his innovation. When I look at art, I'm
seeing the pieces that are coming together and how this
is going to affect the future in domains outside of art.
So that's why I'm able to talk about things like
how Picasso came up with his idea or what's the
difference between why Brock versus Picasso became more influential because
(37:28):
I'm able to look at it through a different lens.
Speaker 2 (37:33):
Yeah, that can be yea very valuable, But I'm.
Speaker 1 (37:36):
By no means an art expert or a music expert.
Speaker 2 (37:40):
Yeah, well yeah, but your your point is that non
experts can still contribute to a field. So I'm not
kinding you out. Thank you, You're welcome. I want to
Anthonay's interview talking about one of my favorite scientific papers
ever published which you and you are a co author
(38:01):
on it. It's called positive more than unbiased self perceptions
increased subjective authenticity. I'm really interested in this topic of
authenticity and the idea that I've called it the authenticity bias,
where we tend to think the real me is really
the positive signs of ourselves. Can you unpack a little
(38:22):
bit about what that research study found and some of
the implications of it.
Speaker 1 (38:27):
So this is a study actually that my PhD student
who's now faculty at Berkeley, Erica Bailey. That's her main topic.
She's passionate about authenticity and we've find in lots of
studies both included in that paper, and then there's another
paper right now under review. Essentially, when we do things
(38:48):
that you might say are fake, you know, like actually,
we currently have a study under review where we look
at people that do different cosmetic procedures, you know, like
botox fillers, et cetera. It turns out that even though
they're doing this thing which we might say is you know, artificial,
(39:09):
they the people who do it actually afterwards feel more authentic,
and they feel more authentic because it is enabling them
to be more in line with what they perceive to be.
They're more unvarnished best self, ideal self before it got tainted,
(39:31):
for example. And so essentially, we have a number of
studies that show that when when we are able to
identify or be seen in the ways that bring out
our better qualities, you know, that's when we feel most authentic.
(39:51):
One of my favorite quotes is from Dolly Parton where
she says, you know, everything about me might be fake,
but I'm really real.
Speaker 2 (40:01):
Well that you just quote a dollar part is No,
that's wonderful. This research, I mean, this is a really
rich series of studies and we can't get in all
the findings, but one of the findings really interesting is
that this positivity bias that you're describing does not extend
to other rated authenticity.
Speaker 1 (40:19):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (40:20):
Can you talk a little bit about that.
Speaker 1 (40:21):
Well, when when we have positive things about ourselves, we
see ourselves as that means we're authentic, but we don't,
you know, when it's other people who are doing things
that are positive, we don't see them as being We
don't give them the same brownie points of authenticity.
Speaker 2 (40:42):
M what does that make us? Does that make us hypocrites?
Speaker 1 (40:50):
Well?
Speaker 2 (40:50):
What does that mean about humans? What does that mean
about humans?
Speaker 1 (40:54):
I mean, I think we're a bit suspicious, right if
somebody else seems too good, then we you know, don't
always know if there we can trust it. Also, the
other thing that's very interesting is even when we are
being authentic and know that we're not faking it, even
(41:17):
though we see ourselves as authentic, that doesn't mean that
others will see us as authentic, which we have a
hard time wrapping our heads around because we believe that
since we're being authentic, obviously it'll be self evident to
other people. But it's actually not so. I think what
I take away is that authenticity is a social construction.
(41:41):
We think of authenticity as being purely self generated and
self defined, but it's actually not true. To the extent.
That you're authentic depends on both your perception of you
and my perception of you, and it's only when there's
(42:01):
alignment between those two perceptions that you're authentic.
Speaker 2 (42:06):
Yeah, so the whole notion of the real me is
a social construction as well. Then there's no real me. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (42:13):
Yeah, yeah, it's just like the third eye test. There's
no real idea that exists until it exists in a
way that both you and I understand what it is.
Speaker 2 (42:26):
If the tree is not perceived in the forest, doesn't exist,
it's interesting question. Yeah. So the takeaway from that paper said,
taking together these findings suggest that being quote unreal through
positive self illusions can paradoxically make one feel more real.
I just find that I find that that research so
(42:46):
fascinating and kudos, big kudos to her. Oh, thank you
and to you and your student on that really terrific work. Shina,
thank you so much for your time today and being
on my podcast. And I hope our listeners have learned
how to make better choice is be more creative and
construct a version of their own self perceived authenticity that
(43:07):
makes them happier in life. So thank you, Shea, thank you,
Take care you too.
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