October 17, 2024 • 42 mins
You can't alway win at work. We all have career setbacks and disappointments - and learning how to deal with them is vital. We need to move on from our mistakes, accept that we're not superhuman, and be willing to see failure as the price of experimenting and taking risks.
Former news anchor Dan Harris (of 10% Happier with Dan Harris and DanHarris.com) joins Dr Laurie Santos to discuss the things that have gone wrong in his work life (he had a panic attack live on national TV) - and the ways in which we can reframe how we greet our career failures.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. This special episode of the Happiness Lab is brought
to you by State Farm, like a good neighbor, State
Farm is there for our special show on World Mental
(00:35):
Health Day. I assembled a group of well being experts
I like to call the Titans of Happiness, Doctor Joy
Harden Bradford, Gretchen Rubin, Dan Harris, and Sesame Street's Elbow.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
Titans of Happiness, Doc Annoyd. What's a Titan, How's a Master?
Speaker 1 (00:53):
It was a super fun crew to hang out with,
but most importantly, we covered a lot of ground. We
gave you some of the most effective and easiest happiness
hacks around. But this year's World Mental Health Day was
dedicated to happiness in the workplace, a topic that's way
too big to fit into just one show. So I'm
bringing you another two episodes on the subject of work
and well being. And I asked one of my happiness Titans,
(01:15):
Dan Harris, to return to the show to help. And
the topic of happiness at work is one that's pretty
important for Dan. In fact, Dan's entire foray into the
study of happiness began after a very unfortunate incident on
the job.
Speaker 3 (01:30):
Two thousand and four, a little bit over twenty years ago,
I was on Good Morning America filling in as what
was called the newsreader. We don't really have this job anymore,
but back then there would be somebody who would come
on at the top of each hour. So the morning
shows at that time went from seven to nine. And
Robin Roberts, who is now the main host of Good
Morning America, her job then was to come on and
(01:52):
read a set of headlines at the top of the
seven and the eight o'clock hour, and I was filling
in for her on this June morning. And I had
done this many times before. I wasn't nervous going in,
but a few seconds into my shtick, I was supposed
to read six brief news items off of the teleprompter.
And by the way, I was thirty two or something
(02:14):
like that at the time. I had for more than
ten years been on television reading off of a teleprompter,
so I really just to set the table here. I
didn't have any idea about what was about to happen.
I was not prepared, and a few seconds into my thing,
I just kind of lost it. My hearts was raising,
(02:35):
my palms were sweating, my mouth dried up, my lungs
seized up.
Speaker 2 (02:39):
I lost the ability to.
Speaker 3 (02:41):
Speak, which is deeply inconvenient if you're anchoring the news,
and I had to kind of squeak out a back
to you, Charlie and Diane. The main hosts of the
show at the time were Diane Sawyer and Charlie Gibson.
And you know, I kind of got away with it
in that it was if you look at it, actually,
if you google panic attack on television, it's the number
(03:01):
one result, which is my mom is very proud of that.
Speaker 2 (03:04):
If you look at it.
Speaker 3 (03:05):
For many people who especially people who've never had a
panic attack before, it does look that bad. I kind
of hold it together, I know when I look at it,
and a lot of people, you know, my mom, who
was watching live, knew exactly what was happening. But the
people in the studio were concerned. But when I lied
to them, and I'm not proud to admit this, but
I did lie and say, yeah, you know, I don't
(03:26):
know what happened, I'm fine, they kind of let it pass.
But I actually knew exactly what had happened. I had
I had had little moments of this on television before
I had dealt with stage fright. For a long time,
I sometimes joked that my career has been a triumph
of narcissism over fear.
Speaker 2 (03:42):
And I really.
Speaker 3 (03:44):
Wanted to be on TV and I loved the job.
But I did have this, you know, bedrock stage fright
I had. I had, however, never had anything that strong,
and so that moment turned out to be one of
the seminal moments of my life.
Speaker 2 (03:57):
In my career too, and I met.
Speaker 1 (03:58):
At the moment, you didn't necessarily think that, right, I mean,
at the moment, it must have felt like a profound failure,
like an enormous screw up, like on live television.
Speaker 2 (04:07):
A million percent. Yes, that's exactly what it felt like.
Speaker 3 (04:10):
I felt totally humiliated and terrified that I was not
going to be able to do this job anymore, that
I was just going to this was going to just
keep on happening. There was no silver lining in the moment,
But in.
Speaker 1 (04:24):
The future, you were able to turn this into a
huge benefit. You were able to learn from this. So
tell me what kind of happened next.
Speaker 3 (04:29):
Yeah, I've been dining out on this shit for a
long Well, nothing much happened initially, Just to you know,
I don't know. You know, many of your listeners may
not have been of age in two thousand and four,
and for those of you who were, you may not
remember this, or maybe you do. But public discussions of
(04:51):
mental health were quite limited at that time, so it
wasn't like I could turn around a week later and
say I had a panic attack and I'm going to
turn this into some sort of public health message that
people might rally around. No, there was none of that
at the time. So that's why I really felt compelled
to lie, because I knew this was not the type
(05:11):
of thing I could safely share with my bosses. What
did happen is that I ended up My mother, who
was watching and was at the time quite a prominent
academic physician at Harvard and also very interested in her
son's well being, got me in to see a shrink,
a psychiatrist, and he diagnosed right away what was going
(05:31):
on because I didn't have a sense of why this
had happened. I knew it was a panic attack, but
I didn't know why. And he asked me a question,
which was due to drugs. I sheepishly said yes, and
he didn't say this, but he gave me a look
that said Okay, as whole mystery solved. Now we know
(05:52):
what happened, just briefly, as a backstory, I had started
doing cocaine after spending a lot of time in war
zones after nine to eleven, and I wasn't high on
the air, but it was enough that ambient drug use
was enough for my shrink to change my brain chemistry
and make it more likely for me to have a
panic attack. So under his tutelage, I quit doing drugs
(06:16):
and began quite intensive therapy for about ten years. And
in the course of those ten years, I started getting
interested in meditation, in part because of his influence, although
he doesn't meditate himself, and in part because I was
just reading more broadly about mental health. And so when
I started getting interested in meditation, I realized there was
(06:38):
at that time a not very well publicized, but quite
robust body of scientific research that suggested that meditation could
have a bunch of health benefits. And yet many of
the books that I was reading about meditation didn't speak
to me. I mean, I could get through it, but
they were quite annoying. And so I wanted to write
(06:58):
a book that used the F word a lot and
told embarrassing stories, and so I led that the book
I wrote about it, which was called ten Percent Happier,
which is now ten yearsyears old. I led that book
with the story of the panic attack and how it
put me on this path to discovering meditation and all
of the interesting things that happened after that.
Speaker 1 (07:20):
And so that, though, was one of only the first
times that you use moments of failure to kind of
learn and generate new career paths and so on. You've
also had a more recent example of this, which you've
referred to as your career earthquake. So I'm curious what
that was and how that failure has changed things for you.
Speaker 3 (07:37):
Well, thank you for pointing out that I continue to
fuck things up on the regular.
Speaker 2 (07:40):
I appreciate that.
Speaker 1 (07:42):
This is an episode about how to fail better, and
I feel like, of folks who failed pretty well, you
are definitely one of my favorite examples.
Speaker 2 (07:47):
So I'm nailing it. I am nailing it.
Speaker 3 (07:51):
Yeah, I mean, just one thing to say by way
of context to it, because sometimes people say to me,
you know, you are quite anxious for an alleged happiness
expert or a quasi self help guru, and to me
that gets the causality wrong. I have become an expert
(08:12):
or a quote unquote expert in this stuff. I would say,
not as much of an expert as you know, in
that I'm not a scientist and I don't have a
full grasp of the research in the way you do.
And we'll talk about some of that coming up. But
I am a flawed person. I continue to be a
(08:32):
flawed person, and I would and I try to be
open about that as a way to normalize other people's flaws.
There's an expression. I don't know who said this, but
this expression cathartic normalization, and that's like my whole brand.
I'm just a journalist who's been meditating for a while
and very interested, you know, on my own podcast, in
(08:56):
all ways in which we can do life better. But
that doesn't mean that I'm perfected, and I'm very suspicious
of people who present themselves as perfect. Just to give
that context for the next story that you're teaming up
to tell, which is that after I wrote ten percent Happier,
I did not expect it to turn into anything. I
remember Barbara Walters, then a major figure in broadcast news,
(09:19):
explicitly telling me when I told her what I was
writing my book about, Don't Quit your day Job. Yeah,
so that gives you an idea of what the culture
was like. So I didn't go into the publication of
that book with anything other than fear.
Speaker 2 (09:33):
But I certainly I didn't think.
Speaker 3 (09:34):
I mean, I harbored some fantasies that it would be successful,
but I didn't really think it would happen. And it
just turned out that it came out at the right time,
right when meditation was starting to get cool again, and
right when we were starting to be more open about
public health mental health issues publicly, and ABC News really
got behind the book, and so it took off, which
was amazing, and it led to a bunch of opportunities,
(09:57):
including starting a meditation app which was called ten percent Happier,
and so that company was around for about eight years
under the name ten percent Happier. In recent years, I
developed a series of interpersonal and creative and financial differences
with my co founders, who are excellent people, Like, there's
(10:20):
no bad guy in this story.
Speaker 2 (10:22):
You know, if there is one, maybe it's me.
Speaker 3 (10:24):
Just to say I take fifty percent of the responsibility
at least for this failure. I do want to say
that they are continuing to operate the company, So I
don't want to call the company a failure.
Speaker 2 (10:34):
It still exists.
Speaker 3 (10:35):
It's called the Happier Meditation app, so it's no longer
called ten percent Happier. But the separation from the company
was incredibly difficult for me. I experienced a lot of
anger and fear and frustration, and there were many times
where I lost my temper and I was I lost
my ability to sleep for several years. You know, I
(10:55):
really took a significant toll on my mental and physical health.
If you look at pictures before this, I mean, I
had way fewer gray airs. So this is one of
the hardest things I've ever gone through, you know, because
I considered the company to be my baby, and I
don't have it anymore.
Speaker 1 (11:12):
I think this story is really profound because it illustrates
a number of the different kinds of ways that failure
can affect us. I mean, a big one is just
the effect that failure can have on our health. Right,
Like you're not sleeping, you're not eating, like I mean,
you've talked about this really blootlyate that, like you just
didn't basically sleep at all for several years while this
was going on. But an even bigger one that I
(11:33):
think I hear in your story is this idea that
failure can really affect our identity, like our sense of
who I was. And this seems to be a big
one in your story. You'd stepped away from this role
being a kind of a newsperson for ABC. You became
this kind of you know, co CEO of a company,
and now all of a sudden that identity seems to
be kind of falling apart or at least generating lots
of conflict. How did you handle that?
Speaker 2 (11:53):
Not well?
Speaker 3 (11:55):
And I do want to hear some stories from you
about I'm not aware of any failures and your empathy
set that they've happened. I want to I do want
to hear about them if you're comfortable talking about it.
But I will say that you've nailed it. I mean,
you're pointing at it. One of the big points of
struggle for me was the identity piece of this. It
was embarrassing to even though the struggle behind the scenes
(12:20):
lasted for nearly three years, it wasn't public, but you know,
the people in my life knew about it, and I
knew eventually it was going to be public, and I
was embarrassed. I'm supposed to be, you know, mister mindfulness,
and here I am embroiled in this you know, protracted conflict.
And yeah, I felt like a fraud, honestly, and I felt,
you know, very helpless that I couldn't wave a magic
(12:41):
wand and make this go away because there were two
parties at the table, and we had a lot of
contracts that we had signed that needed to be unwound,
and I couldn't just make things happen my way. And
so you know that I wasn't sleeping. I started having
panic attacks again, still dealing with the reverberations of that,
you know, the panic attacks this time really started to
(13:01):
come in situations of claustrophobia, which my shrink, my current shrink,
has had a field day with. And so you know,
I've still struggling to get on planes and in elevators
and I'm doing it.
Speaker 2 (13:12):
But you're absolutely right.
Speaker 3 (13:13):
It took a big toll, and especially on the identity front.
Not only did I feel embarrassed, as you know, a
mental health spokesperson of sorts, to be in this situation,
but as you mentioned, I had retired from ABC News.
Now about three years ago, and it was right after
I retired from the news that the problems started coming
(13:34):
up with my co founders, and so I no longer
had my news anchor identity, and now this app that
I had poured so much of myself into was is
no longer mine. And yeah, so that's all been very challenging.
Speaker 1 (13:47):
But one of the reasons we're having this conversation is
that you've managed to do really cool things from this
moment of kind of career earthquake, and also you've learned
a lot, and those are the kinds of learning so
that we're going to get to when the Happiness Lab
gets back from the break. Workplaces can be this sort
(14:17):
of spot that we generate lots and lots of happiness,
but they can also be these places where we experience failure.
So I think kind of looking really carefully at the
kinds of ways that we get failure wrong and the
ways that we can benefit from failure can be really important.
And I think one of the biggest teachings that it
sounds like you've come up with that you've talked about
on your show is this idea that even though failure
is really scary and it's got all these terrible elements.
(14:40):
It's not actually as bad as we think, like there
are benefits that can come from it. Explain what you mean.
Speaker 2 (14:44):
There many benefits.
Speaker 3 (14:46):
Many as somebody who fails regularly, I can tell you
there are many benefits. And I actually think that we
might even want to play with that word. I don't
know what an alternative is, but maybe it's something in
the range of experimentation.
Speaker 1 (15:00):
You know.
Speaker 3 (15:01):
I think we live in a pandemic of perfectionism, and
I'm sure you see this on campus with your students.
Perfectionism is really on the rise, and it is such
an insidious thing. People are unwilling to take risks because
they don't want to fail. A part that I think
this is because we live our lives so publicly on
social media, this kind of panopticon we've created for ourselves
(15:23):
where everybody can see what we're doing. We feel so
much pressure to present a curated, perfected version of ourselves,
when of course our lives aren't like that. And then
of course we're comparing ourselves to other people's lives that
seem perfect, and we know that we're a mess, and
so something must be uniquely wrong with us. And one
of the many, many pernicious impacts of this is that
(15:44):
people are unwilling often to take risks and to run experiments.
And a big part of running experiments and taking risks
is you're going to fail. But to reframe that, there's
a difference between humiliation and humility. You can be humbled
in a good way in that you've learned something about
yourself and about the world, as opposed to a humiliation
(16:06):
which kind of coils you up in and thoughts about yourself,
where you're stuck in shame, you're stuck in your own
as I sometimes say, and I think I said this
the last time I was on your show, that your
head's up your ass in a in a pretty profound way.
And I know that's kind of a gross image. But
when you're in that mode, it's hard to learn. But
(16:27):
when you can be in a mode of humility, or
to use a term from your milia, when you've got
a growth mindset, which is that you're willing to take
risks and a failure doesn't mean somehow you are unworthy
or perpetually incapable. It just means you learned a thing
(16:48):
and you can grow from it. Does that all land
for you, given what you know about the research.
Speaker 1 (16:53):
Yeah, completely. I mean I think the growth mindset idea
is really quite apt, right. I think we do often
enough kind of put the word yet at the end
of everything we do, right, you know, I, you know,
started a new meditation company and it hasn't really worked
out yet, Right. I quit my job and tried to
do something new in the field, but it hasn't worked
out yet. You know. Carol Dweck's research suggests just putting
(17:15):
that word yet at the end just completely reframes the
way you're thinking, right, because it's not like, well, I've
screwed up, you know, everything's over, I'm dead. It's like, oh,
it just hasn't clicked yet, Right, There's some time for
this to kind of work out, and I've learned something,
so I'm more likely to get it the next time
because I've sort of figured it out. I think that
mindset shift is kind of huge. I think another mindset
shift that's really big, and it seems like one that
(17:36):
you've embraced a bit, is just this idea that like
it's actually not as bad as we think, right, that like,
ultimately I'm probably going to be okay, Right, this sort
of stems from some of the lovely work by Dan
Gilbert and his colleagues about how bad we are what
he calls affective forecasting, which is just like predicting how
bad some bad event is actually going to be. We
have so many mechanisms in our mind to make it
(17:57):
go a little bit better that it's really never as
bad as we often think.
Speaker 2 (18:00):
That's so well said.
Speaker 3 (18:01):
You know, we've interviewed one another many times over the years,
but actually we haven't spent I don't think any time
in person, so I don't know.
Speaker 2 (18:10):
You that well.
Speaker 3 (18:11):
We have this kind of I have this kind of
parasocial relationship with you. But for observing you from a distance,
it seems like your career is just a progress of
strength to strength to strength. You know, starting this course,
which is the most popular course it's ever existed at Yale,
and then starting this podcast, which is so huge. But
(18:31):
have you encountered professional setbacks that you'd be comfortable talking about, Oh.
Speaker 1 (18:35):
My gosh, of course. I mean one of the biggest
ones was that, you know, as I was starting this
big class and starting this podcast and running a residential
college at Yale and doing all this work, I got
incredibly burned out, Like so burned out that I wound
up taking time off my role as being ahead of college,
which was embarrassing for all the reasons that you just
talked about. Right, I'm supposed to be the self help
(18:56):
grow and here I am completely burned out. And the
form of my burnout was a particular one, which is
that I got incredibly cynical. So these clinical psychologists who
talk about burnout often talk about these sort of three
features of burnout is the one we usually think about
where you're emotionally exhausted, And I was for sure that,
right you take a weekend off and you come back
Monday morning, you're just as depleted as when you'd started before,
(19:18):
Like I was feeling that, I was also feeling what
they call a sense of personal ineffectiveness. Then even if
I was doing my job perfectly, it kind of wouldn't
be good enough, or I wouldn't be proud of it.
This is all going down kind of at the tail
end of COVID, when just doing things on campus generally
wasn't very fun. But the particular insidious consequence of burnout
that I was experiencing that I was most embarrassed about
(19:41):
was what researcher is called depersonalization, which is kind of
just a form of cynicism, which is like everyone that
you work with and care about is getting on your
last nerve and you want to just explode on them
all the time. You even start viewing their intentions as
kind of evil or like just a pain in the ass.
And this was what I was experiencing with my students.
Right I'd get an email from a student who had
(20:02):
to get a root canal and needed some money from
the college to be able to do it, and my
instant reaction wasn't just like true compassion for this student,
which is what I like to think was the typical
reaction for most of my career. My reaction was like, oh,
what a pain in the ass, Like I have to
send these other emails. And when I started noticing this,
like at first I didn't want to tell anybody because
I felt kind of like a fraud. I felt a
(20:24):
little bit ashamed for having those emotions, right, Like, I'm
supposed to be in this role where I have uttered
compassion for the students in my community, and I wasn't
feeling it. But I think in part because of my
training in some of this stuff. I'm mindful enough to
notice these signs, right, I'm like, wait a minute, this
is like a huge flashing emotional signal that's not supposed
to be there. That's telling me I'm overwhelmed and I
(20:45):
need to take some time off. So yeah, at the
kind of realizing that I stepped away from my role
as a head of college on campus, not as public
that use. It wasn't like on live TV, but I
had a front page New York Times magazine article about
like happiness professor burned out And got a call from
my mother in law who was like, were you gonna
tell us that you're like stepping away from your role
(21:06):
and taking a year off? So yeah, So you know,
I think we all have our own forms of what
feels like failure, what feels like us not living up
to our ideals. And that was definitely a moment for
me where I was feeling that way. So I can
relate to the F word, but not the F word
we keep talking about the failure effort.
Speaker 3 (21:26):
That's an incredible story. I hope this doesn't sound wrong,
but I'm like proud of you for telling it. I
don't mean that in a patronizing way at all. It's
just it's like very brave. Other than taking time off,
what helped you pull out of it?
Speaker 1 (21:41):
Well, taking time off was huge, and I took time
off in a big way, Like I just left Yale
for a year. I moved to Boston, just like Hold
Up with Friends just kind of restructured my life around
thinking about the podcast and stuff, but not doing a
lot of my professorial work. And that changed a lot,
you know. I mean therapy was part of it too, right,
as like you know, as it always is, but it
(22:02):
was really trying to focus on like what have I
been telling everybody to do? And what would I tell
myself in this situation? And for me, I think the difference,
Whichhich kind of gets back to a lot of the
stuff that you've talked about was that, you know, it
was the normal stuff that I teach students, these behavioral changes,
right like engage in more social connection and you know,
exercise and try to focus on your sleep. But a
lot of it was changes to my self talk, right,
(22:24):
A lot of it was changes to kind of that
crappy drill sergeant voice in my head telling me I
have to be the perfect happiness expert. All the time,
I was like, you know, embracing Kristin nef self compassion
work in a huge, huge way, and that honestly was
a lot of what has helped a lot, right and
just one of the reasons I feel like I've overcome
my burnout enough to kind of get back into the
(22:45):
classroom and do more work at Yale and really kind
of get back to this work in a different way.
Speaker 3 (22:50):
It's a big deal that you're talking about this publicly
modeling failure and the resilience. I just don't want that
to slip by. It's awesome that you've done it and
now you're back in the classroom.
Speaker 2 (23:02):
That's a huge deal.
Speaker 3 (23:05):
I also just want to, you know, plus one on
the work of Kristin Nef self Compassion, which always scanned
to me as a you know, I'm going to use
some social justice boiler plate here, but always scanned to
me as you know, as a heteronormative cis mail as
beyond the pale cheesy. But you know, one of the
(23:26):
amazing things that Kristen's done is muster a pretty convincing
amount of research backing for the argument that if you
can learn to talk to yourself the way you would
talk to a good friend. You know, it can make
you much more effective.
Speaker 1 (23:42):
We've talked about this on the podcast before, but I
can help say. My favorite example of Kristin Nef's work
that I think really shows how powerful and how not
kind of wooy this sort of technique is is her
lovely work showing that if you teach self compassion techniques
to combat veterans, they're less likely to get PTSD. And
I love the study because it gets around what I
(24:02):
sometimes find is a challenge talking about the self compassion work,
which is that it has really crappy marketing. We're being
really it sounds sort of like fluffy and self compassion
y and like you're going to talk to yourself like
a friend. And I remember talking about this work in
front of folks from the military. I was doing a
talk for Navy seals and you could see the faces
in the audience where I'm putting this up of like,
(24:24):
you know, talk to yoursel it's all about self kindness,
and they're rolling their eyes. But then you show the
data where it's like, actually, when you train folks in
the military to be a bit more mindful to kind
of stop the drill sergeant in their head even though
they're listening to the drill sergeant on the field. Now,
all of a sudden, they start performing better, they wind
up healthier in the face of true conflict and really
terrible circumstances. Now it starts to seem less kind of
(24:45):
woo woo and a little bit more like sciencey and
in the trenches.
Speaker 3 (24:49):
But absolutely, and for me it's again as somebody who's
probably who's factory settings are closer to somebody who's in
the military, although physically I never would have cut it
in the military, but I'm a little bit, you know,
psychologically closer to that. It's not so much the self kindness,
the self compassion of it all sounded vaguely auto erotic
(25:09):
to me.
Speaker 2 (25:09):
It was more like.
Speaker 3 (25:13):
Switching up from an inner drill sergeant to an inner coach.
And we've all had good coaches, and they don't shy
away from pointing out where our flaws are and when
we've made mistakes. But they're just not assholes about it.
And that's that's what's being called for here, not some
sort of gooey gooey you know, staring in the mirror
(25:33):
and talking to yourself and kissing the mirror and talking
about how great you are. It's really about having a
dry eyed, clear eyed, but warm sense of self appraisal
and talking yourself through it again the way you would
with your kid or a good friend if they called
you in a moment where they were in extremis And
that's really helpful. And I would add on top of this,
(25:54):
and I'm sure you know his work way better than
I do, but I have found as a supplement to
Kristin Neff's work, and this is all very relevant to
how you talk to yourself and failure is Ethan Cross
from the University of Michigan and all of the work
he's done specifically looking at how to most effectively talk
to yourself.
Speaker 1 (26:12):
Yeah, and just the simple way that you can do
that by using your own name or as I know
you do, Dan, not Dan, but dude, Hey, dude, what
are you doing. It's fine, It's gonna be all right.
Let's take a long view. It's probably not as bad
as you think, right. Yeah, those types of techniques have
been have been really really huge for me too. Another
one that I know you've talked a lot about in
(26:33):
the podcast, so I think is something that's resonated with
both of our stories of failure is how you navigate
negative emotions and whether you allow them in I think
I wouldn't be in a healthier place than I was
when I was feeling my maximill burnout right now if
I didn't really allow the emotion of overwhelm, if I
didn't like sit with it and notice it, which is
(26:55):
definitely not my instinct right as like a you know,
hardcore type a academic at an ivy League university. I'm
a very kind of stiff upper lips, squish that emotion down.
This is very inconvenient. I'm gonna ignore it and sort
of power through. But like, actually noticing how depleted I
was feeling, as awful as it was feeling, was sort
of really essential for kind of getting better. And my
(27:17):
understanding is that this has been part of your story too,
this idea of kind of embracing those negative emotions rather
than running away from them.
Speaker 3 (27:25):
Absolutely. I'm curious, like what modalities did you use? Was
it therapy, was it meditation? Did what were your practices
that helped you like not be at war with your
own inner reality?
Speaker 1 (27:37):
Partly therapy, partly a lot of this just focus on
noticing what my thought patterns were. That hasn't for me
come so much through like more formal meditation practices, but
a lot of these sort of maybe informal self talk
practices of just kind of noticing it. I think I
mostly felt it in my body right. It was sort
of helpful that this was during COVID time and you're
sort of trapped in your house. I feel like I
(27:57):
was able to notice my body more. I wasn't traveling
around and do it. I wasn't as busy kind of
as in the typical way that I was, and so
it just helped to sort of notice that a little
bit more. But yeah, for me, it was pretty body
to just kind of feel it and notice it.
Speaker 3 (28:11):
Yeah, I mean that'll to me that all sounds great.
I know that I'm known, as to the extent that
anybody knows who I am, as kind of mister meditation,
and I really am a deep believer in the power
of the practice. But I'm not a meditation fundamentalist. What
I would say, however, in this regard, in this particular
sphere of being able to sit with your emotions, which
(28:35):
is a really counterintuitive but powerful skill meditation for me,
has been a it is a it goes right at
that is it is with extreme prejudice, it goes right
at this value proposition of being able to weather your
own internal storms by giving you a set of tools
to sit in the middle of it without being owned
(28:57):
by it. One little phrase that might be useful that
people could use as an inner slogan or a mantra
in this regard, whether you meditate or not, is And
this comes from my meditation teacher, Joseph Goldstein, who's, in
my opinion, just a brilliant, brilliant human being, and he
teaches with these little phrases, these little slogans that are
(29:19):
kind of like earworms, and for me, they really come
up in moments when I need them. And so this
one is going to sound very basic and simple, but
it's profound and it is this it's okay.
Speaker 2 (29:33):
Now.
Speaker 3 (29:33):
This does not mean everything's okay. It means it's okay
to feel what you're feeling right now you can handle
it instead of pushing it away, which doesn't work, or
getting overwhelmed by it and acting out of it, meaning
inviting in the anger and then nurturing it and living
(29:54):
in that space for twenty years or whatever. It just
means that, you know, the half life of an emotion
is whatever, forty five you probably know there's like forty
five seconds or something like that. We tend to make
the emotion last for days, years, a lifetime. But actually,
if you just tell yourself it's okay, I can feel
this anger right now, it will naturally come and go
(30:14):
and there is extraordinary freedom on the other side of it.
Speaker 2 (30:18):
Would you realize, Okay, I didn't do anything.
Speaker 3 (30:20):
I didn't say the thing that's going to ruin the
next forty eight hours of my marriage. Or my son
and I are in a hotel room right now, and
we ordered crow nuts because we're in Vegas, and they
delivered cronuts to the room, and I'm looking at a
crow nut right now, And if I was angry and
not aware of it or unwilling to sit with it,
I might just eat the whole cronut right which again,
I don't want to make food sinful or anything like that.
(30:42):
But you can do lots of things that won't feel
good ultimately, like say something pointed to somebody, or eat
when you're not hungry, and instead it's okay, Like I
can just feel this discomfort for forty five seconds or
however long it lasts. It will pass. It'll probably come
back again, but it will pass. And once it's passed,
(31:03):
you can make better decisions and you can also see
that you can survive more than you think.
Speaker 1 (31:09):
I love It's okay. Can I tell you my latest
earworm that I'm loving a lot. It comes from the
clinical psychologist Ellen Hendrickson, who has this great new book
called How to Be Enough. But she says we have
to go less frozen and more beetles. That when we
think of dealing with our negative emotions, we want to
let it go, but we have to let it be.
I love this idea because I've never been a huge
(31:30):
frozen fan. So less frozen, more beetles, not let it go,
let it be, because I think this is idea is
we think we'll just like get rid of those emotions
or try to toss them out. But the sad thing
is that the real practice is being like, Nope, I'm
just gonna hang out with you and I'm not gonna run.
I'm just gonna let you take your course. And that
can be super scary, and our instinct is just to
(31:51):
squish it down and push it away. But it's really
the act of sitting through the emotion that allows us
to get through it, and sometimes that allows us to
see that the emotion we thought it was isn't exactly
what it was. And I know this is something you
talked a lot about in kind of your career Earthquake.
Is that the the first presentation of a lot of
the emotions you were dealing with was anger, anger at
(32:13):
the company, anger at the situation or the contract or whatever.
But what did you find out when you sat with
the anger? Did it stay anger all the time?
Speaker 3 (32:20):
That's a great question. First of all, just to say
I love Ellen Hendrickson.
Speaker 2 (32:23):
Two.
Speaker 3 (32:24):
I didn't know she had a new book, so I
need to get her on my show. But she wrote
a book years ago about social anxiety that I still
quote to people who are struggling with that. Yes, anger,
For me, when I sat with it, I realized that
it's often described as a secondary emotion, as you know,
so it's often covering up for something else. And for me,
(32:49):
if I could muster the wherewithal to sit with the
discomfort of the anger, I could see that underneath it
was fear, and that's a hard thing. Again, It just
kind of kind of goes back to how masculinity can
manifest I know from men, from many men, like, we
don't want to admit that we're scared, and so anger
(33:09):
is a much more comfortable place to be. A friend
of mine once joke that he had two emotional gears,
anger and self pity, And I really see myself in that.
But you know, as painful as it is, it's better,
I think, to tune into what's really going on than
to just be stuck in the anger, because you're much
(33:29):
less likely I in my experience, to get to resolution
if you stay in the anger, but to tune into
the fear, Like what am I worried about? I'm worried
about all the identity stuff that you brought up earlier.
What is this all going to say about me? I'm
worried about. Am I going to you know, am I
going to have to like sell the house and move
my family somewhere else? Lots of things I was worried about,
(33:52):
and I have, you know, for me, this is actually
something that makes failure such a fraught issue, especially at work.
I have this, really, I think, this really deep ancestral
fear of destitution and it's totally irrational. I am absolutely
(34:15):
comfortable financially. I was raised, I have had every advantage
that is available, except for maybe the fact that I'm
not tall. But you know, white straight male raised by
loving parents who were upper middle class, was able to
go to college, all of the advantages, and yet just
I have this nagging, irrational fear about running out of money.
(34:36):
And have learned later in life that I had a
great grandfather. His name is Arthur LAbau was Leebuwitz, but
he changed it to Lebau because it wasn't a great
place for Jews in the early nineteen hundreds and the
United States wasn't and he wanted to sound French. And
he was a total like huckster, and you had a
(34:58):
series of failed businesses and that ultimately became a bail bondsman,
but a corrupt one, and was putting up his family members'
houses as collateral for these crooks to get out out
of jail. And one of them skip bond, and this guy,
the FBI swooped in, and I might I found a
bunch of articles about this, Like the FBI swooped in.
My great grandmother had to like testify in federal court
(35:21):
and Arthur Lebau took his own life in the family
kitchen and his daughter's found h Yeah, and that dude's
energy is in my veins. And that's just the best
explanation I can come up with for why I, or
at least part of why this is such a bugaboo
for me.
Speaker 2 (35:40):
And so in.
Speaker 3 (35:42):
Failure, I've had the opportunity to get a little bit
closer to this dude. And and for me, what's really
helpful is to be like, when I see him rearing
his head.
Speaker 2 (35:56):
Thank you, you know, thank you? This is I don't,
I don't.
Speaker 3 (36:00):
You're giving me shitty ideas I'm not going to hopefully
I'm not going to act on them. But the impulse
is as one of the great meditation teachers I know,
a guy named Jack Pornfield, the impulse is just the
organism trying to protect itself.
Speaker 2 (36:12):
Right.
Speaker 3 (36:12):
So it fundamentally is a helpful instinct to have all
this fear or to be like us hustling all the
time to make sure that my career is in a
good place. But over time, as I've been able to
make peace with this character, internally, I'm less owned by him.
It's a kind of radical disarmament. Does all of that
(36:34):
make sense to you?
Speaker 1 (36:35):
No, totally. I think there are two things in there
that really fit with the science, right. The first is
this idea of kind of having gratitude for this belief
that's otherwise kind of causing this terrible scarcity mindset, maybe
because of you to make bad decisions. But if your
instinct was to hate it, which I'm sure it probably
is your natural instinct, but if you kind of went
with that instinct to hate it and you're just angry
at it the whole time, like you wouldn't ever be
(36:56):
able to kind of look at it and allow it
and see what it's doing. So kind of embracing it
with gratitude is a really great strategy, right. It kind
of allows you to look at it and really deal
with that belief and sort of ask the question is
it really useful to you? It's trying to help you,
but is it really helping you? I think another really
the thing I really love about this story is that
by kind of putting that in Leboo's words, that it's
(37:19):
his thought, it gives you some distance from that thought yourself. Right,
You're able to think of it as like that's a belief.
It's not an objective truth about the world. It's a
belief that I can sort of see the origin story
and you can almost label it as sort of one
of his beliefs, kind of, it's your ancestral belief right
it doesn't have to be yours right now. You can
pick and choose whether or not it's right for you.
And that's a sort of classic distancing strategy that you
(37:40):
get from cognitive behavioral therapy. You know, folks like work,
like folks from Ethan Cross and so on, and so
I think there's elements there that the science would really
line up with that. That's a great strategy.
Speaker 3 (37:51):
This is why it's always so great to talk to you,
because you can take my crazy shit and like give
it some scientific ovind here.
Speaker 2 (37:57):
It's true.
Speaker 1 (37:57):
That's that's what the researchers would say you should do. Anyway.
The final thing I want to talk to you that
I was really impressed with your story about failure is
this kind of optimism that you brought to it, at
least sort of in the end part of the process.
And you talked a lot about trying to sort of
embrace this whole situation with what you called radical optimism,
and so I'm curious if you could define what that
(38:17):
means and how it sort of played out in your story.
Speaker 2 (38:20):
You know, I don't I could.
Speaker 3 (38:22):
Anybody listening to this, including you can can fact check
me on this. But my understanding and really this comes
from interviewing a guy named Frederick Fairt p feer Dt,
who was an innovation ma is an innovation maybe in
at both Stanford and Google, and he talks about radical
optimism as the idea that failure and we talked about
(38:45):
this earlier is embedded in failure is progress if you
are willing to learn from it, so you can you
can launch a big project and for me, like I
just launched a big new project in the aftermath of
ten percent happier, the app not going my way and
in my sanest moments, in my most radically optimistic moment.
(39:09):
And this isn't like, this is not irrational optimism. This
is radical optimism, right, so it's actually evidence based, fact based,
reality based. I can tell myself the story that this
thing may not work, but I will have made progress
anyway because I will have learned for the next thing.
Speaker 1 (39:27):
I love that this comes from like all the Stanford
tech folks, because this has been kind of an ethos
that has never been kind of my mom but seems
to be on EMO that really works if you judge
from companies like Facebook and Google and so on, which
is like move fast and break things. Right. I'm cool
with the move fast, like that kind of fits with
my em pretty well. But the break things, I'm like,
oh that, But it's like explicit in that kind of
(39:49):
plan for how you live your life and come up
with ideas and so on, and inherent in that is
just the idea of what you were just saying, right,
which is that like you have to break things to
learn what actually works. If the thing just kind of
works perfectly the first time you design it, then you
haven't really learned much of anything in terms that'll matter
for your kind of product working well or in the
case of our own psychology, for and resilience moving forward.
Speaker 3 (40:10):
Yeah, I would say the one asterisk there is that
in my understanding, at least too often in the tech world,
they're breaking things and breaking people and acting you know,
maybe without you know, the highest integrity sometimes And so
this isn't about and I'm not saying this to you.
I'm saying it just to anybody who might be tempted
to misinterpret this. This isn't about you know, just being
(40:33):
a dick, or you know, or not giving a shit
about other people, or burning yourself out and other people out.
It's really like moving fast and break things. The way
I interpret it for myself is a willingness to fail,
a willingness to try things. And yeah, this is another
Silicon Valley cliche that I like to fail fast, to
(40:53):
try a bunch of stuff and then pivot quickly. And
there's this an enormous amount of resilience available to if
you're open to having aired.
Speaker 1 (41:03):
Yeah, and not to beat the crap out of yourself
when you do that, right, because it's hard to fail
fast if you're in the fetal position about what a
loser you are. Right. The trouble with Tigingy Duden is
that we cover so much ground that when I'm in
the position of summing up, it feels like there's a
lot to do. But I think first bullet point in
my sum up list is that you and I both
screw up a lot, and we like to learn from
(41:23):
our screw ups and then share what we learn with
lots of people and so thank you for helping me
out with that. But it seems like among the things
we've learned is that failure not as bad as we think,
lots of benefits we don't expect. If you're feeling terrified
about failure, that's probably just an affective forecasting error coming up.
But if you need tips to deal with failure, self compassion,
the catchup of all self talk strategies, it just makes
(41:46):
everything tastier and better. We need a little bit of
radical optimism so that we can kind of remember that
failure is probably not just not as bad as we think,
but also going to be really helpful. And beyond that,
we need some strategies to kind of really allow our
negative emotions and to remember that it's going to be okay.
You're the career journalist. What did I forget?
Speaker 3 (42:06):
I think that that was a perfect sum up, and
I would I did very quickly. One other thing, you know,
for people wanting to navigate failure successfully is make it
a team sport.
Speaker 2 (42:16):
You know, have people you can talk to about it.
Speaker 1 (42:19):
Super Dan, thanks so much for being so frank about
your failure and for helping me be so frank about mine.
This was an awesome episode.
Speaker 2 (42:25):
Thank you, Laurie. I love talking, and next.
Speaker 1 (42:27):
Time we're going to come back and talk more about
well being at work. We're going to focus more specifically
on the recommendations that came out on World Mental Health
Day about what we can do as individuals and maybe
also as employers to make sure we're thriving at work.
Pushkin. This special episode of the Happiness Lab is brought
to you by State Farm, like a good neighbor, State
Farm is there for our special show on World Mental
(00:35):
Health Day. I assembled a group of well being experts
I like to call the Titans of Happiness, Doctor Joy
Harden Bradford, Gretchen Rubin, Dan Harris, and Sesame Street's Elbow.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
Titans of Happiness, Doc Annoyd. What's a Titan, How's a Master?
Speaker 1 (00:53):
It was a super fun crew to hang out with,
but most importantly, we covered a lot of ground. We
gave you some of the most effective and easiest happiness
hacks around. But this year's World Mental Health Day was
dedicated to happiness in the workplace, a topic that's way
too big to fit into just one show. So I'm
bringing you another two episodes on the subject of work
and well being. And I asked one of my happiness Titans,
(01:15):
Dan Harris, to return to the show to help. And
the topic of happiness at work is one that's pretty
important for Dan. In fact, Dan's entire foray into the
study of happiness began after a very unfortunate incident on
the job.
Speaker 3 (01:30):
Two thousand and four, a little bit over twenty years ago,
I was on Good Morning America filling in as what
was called the newsreader. We don't really have this job anymore,
but back then there would be somebody who would come
on at the top of each hour. So the morning
shows at that time went from seven to nine. And
Robin Roberts, who is now the main host of Good
Morning America, her job then was to come on and
(01:52):
read a set of headlines at the top of the
seven and the eight o'clock hour, and I was filling
in for her on this June morning. And I had
done this many times before. I wasn't nervous going in,
but a few seconds into my shtick, I was supposed
to read six brief news items off of the teleprompter.
And by the way, I was thirty two or something
(02:14):
like that at the time. I had for more than
ten years been on television reading off of a teleprompter,
so I really just to set the table here. I
didn't have any idea about what was about to happen.
I was not prepared, and a few seconds into my thing,
I just kind of lost it. My hearts was raising,
(02:35):
my palms were sweating, my mouth dried up, my lungs
seized up.
Speaker 2 (02:39):
I lost the ability to.
Speaker 3 (02:41):
Speak, which is deeply inconvenient if you're anchoring the news,
and I had to kind of squeak out a back
to you, Charlie and Diane. The main hosts of the
show at the time were Diane Sawyer and Charlie Gibson.
And you know, I kind of got away with it
in that it was if you look at it, actually,
if you google panic attack on television, it's the number
(03:01):
one result, which is my mom is very proud of that.
Speaker 2 (03:04):
If you look at it.
Speaker 3 (03:05):
For many people who especially people who've never had a
panic attack before, it does look that bad. I kind
of hold it together, I know when I look at it,
and a lot of people, you know, my mom, who
was watching live, knew exactly what was happening. But the
people in the studio were concerned. But when I lied
to them, and I'm not proud to admit this, but
I did lie and say, yeah, you know, I don't
(03:26):
know what happened, I'm fine, they kind of let it pass.
But I actually knew exactly what had happened. I had
I had had little moments of this on television before
I had dealt with stage fright. For a long time,
I sometimes joked that my career has been a triumph
of narcissism over fear.
Speaker 2 (03:42):
And I really.
Speaker 3 (03:44):
Wanted to be on TV and I loved the job.
But I did have this, you know, bedrock stage fright
I had. I had, however, never had anything that strong,
and so that moment turned out to be one of
the seminal moments of my life.
Speaker 2 (03:57):
In my career too, and I met.
Speaker 1 (03:58):
At the moment, you didn't necessarily think that, right, I mean,
at the moment, it must have felt like a profound failure,
like an enormous screw up, like on live television.
Speaker 2 (04:07):
A million percent. Yes, that's exactly what it felt like.
Speaker 3 (04:10):
I felt totally humiliated and terrified that I was not
going to be able to do this job anymore, that
I was just going to this was going to just
keep on happening. There was no silver lining in the moment,
But in.
Speaker 1 (04:24):
The future, you were able to turn this into a
huge benefit. You were able to learn from this. So
tell me what kind of happened next.
Speaker 3 (04:29):
Yeah, I've been dining out on this shit for a
long Well, nothing much happened initially, Just to you know,
I don't know. You know, many of your listeners may
not have been of age in two thousand and four,
and for those of you who were, you may not
remember this, or maybe you do. But public discussions of
(04:51):
mental health were quite limited at that time, so it
wasn't like I could turn around a week later and
say I had a panic attack and I'm going to
turn this into some sort of public health message that
people might rally around. No, there was none of that
at the time. So that's why I really felt compelled
to lie, because I knew this was not the type
(05:11):
of thing I could safely share with my bosses. What
did happen is that I ended up My mother, who
was watching and was at the time quite a prominent
academic physician at Harvard and also very interested in her
son's well being, got me in to see a shrink,
a psychiatrist, and he diagnosed right away what was going
(05:31):
on because I didn't have a sense of why this
had happened. I knew it was a panic attack, but
I didn't know why. And he asked me a question,
which was due to drugs. I sheepishly said yes, and
he didn't say this, but he gave me a look
that said Okay, as whole mystery solved. Now we know
(05:52):
what happened, just briefly, as a backstory, I had started
doing cocaine after spending a lot of time in war
zones after nine to eleven, and I wasn't high on
the air, but it was enough that ambient drug use
was enough for my shrink to change my brain chemistry
and make it more likely for me to have a
panic attack. So under his tutelage, I quit doing drugs
(06:16):
and began quite intensive therapy for about ten years. And
in the course of those ten years, I started getting
interested in meditation, in part because of his influence, although
he doesn't meditate himself, and in part because I was
just reading more broadly about mental health. And so when
I started getting interested in meditation, I realized there was
(06:38):
at that time a not very well publicized, but quite
robust body of scientific research that suggested that meditation could
have a bunch of health benefits. And yet many of
the books that I was reading about meditation didn't speak
to me. I mean, I could get through it, but
they were quite annoying. And so I wanted to write
(06:58):
a book that used the F word a lot and
told embarrassing stories, and so I led that the book
I wrote about it, which was called ten Percent Happier,
which is now ten yearsyears old. I led that book
with the story of the panic attack and how it
put me on this path to discovering meditation and all
of the interesting things that happened after that.
Speaker 1 (07:20):
And so that, though, was one of only the first
times that you use moments of failure to kind of
learn and generate new career paths and so on. You've
also had a more recent example of this, which you've
referred to as your career earthquake. So I'm curious what
that was and how that failure has changed things for you.
Speaker 3 (07:37):
Well, thank you for pointing out that I continue to
fuck things up on the regular.
Speaker 2 (07:40):
I appreciate that.
Speaker 1 (07:42):
This is an episode about how to fail better, and
I feel like, of folks who failed pretty well, you
are definitely one of my favorite examples.
Speaker 2 (07:47):
So I'm nailing it. I am nailing it.
Speaker 3 (07:51):
Yeah, I mean, just one thing to say by way
of context to it, because sometimes people say to me,
you know, you are quite anxious for an alleged happiness
expert or a quasi self help guru, and to me
that gets the causality wrong. I have become an expert
(08:12):
or a quote unquote expert in this stuff. I would say,
not as much of an expert as you know, in
that I'm not a scientist and I don't have a
full grasp of the research in the way you do.
And we'll talk about some of that coming up. But
I am a flawed person. I continue to be a
(08:32):
flawed person, and I would and I try to be
open about that as a way to normalize other people's flaws.
There's an expression. I don't know who said this, but
this expression cathartic normalization, and that's like my whole brand.
I'm just a journalist who's been meditating for a while
and very interested, you know, on my own podcast, in
(08:56):
all ways in which we can do life better. But
that doesn't mean that I'm perfected, and I'm very suspicious
of people who present themselves as perfect. Just to give
that context for the next story that you're teaming up
to tell, which is that after I wrote ten percent Happier,
I did not expect it to turn into anything. I
remember Barbara Walters, then a major figure in broadcast news,
(09:19):
explicitly telling me when I told her what I was
writing my book about, Don't Quit your day Job. Yeah,
so that gives you an idea of what the culture
was like. So I didn't go into the publication of
that book with anything other than fear.
Speaker 2 (09:33):
But I certainly I didn't think.
Speaker 3 (09:34):
I mean, I harbored some fantasies that it would be successful,
but I didn't really think it would happen. And it
just turned out that it came out at the right time,
right when meditation was starting to get cool again, and
right when we were starting to be more open about
public health mental health issues publicly, and ABC News really
got behind the book, and so it took off, which
was amazing, and it led to a bunch of opportunities,
(09:57):
including starting a meditation app which was called ten percent Happier,
and so that company was around for about eight years
under the name ten percent Happier. In recent years, I
developed a series of interpersonal and creative and financial differences
with my co founders, who are excellent people, Like, there's
(10:20):
no bad guy in this story.
Speaker 2 (10:22):
You know, if there is one, maybe it's me.
Speaker 3 (10:24):
Just to say I take fifty percent of the responsibility
at least for this failure. I do want to say
that they are continuing to operate the company, So I
don't want to call the company a failure.
Speaker 2 (10:34):
It still exists.
Speaker 3 (10:35):
It's called the Happier Meditation app, so it's no longer
called ten percent Happier. But the separation from the company
was incredibly difficult for me. I experienced a lot of
anger and fear and frustration, and there were many times
where I lost my temper and I was I lost
my ability to sleep for several years. You know, I
(10:55):
really took a significant toll on my mental and physical health.
If you look at pictures before this, I mean, I
had way fewer gray airs. So this is one of
the hardest things I've ever gone through, you know, because
I considered the company to be my baby, and I
don't have it anymore.
Speaker 1 (11:12):
I think this story is really profound because it illustrates
a number of the different kinds of ways that failure
can affect us. I mean, a big one is just
the effect that failure can have on our health. Right,
Like you're not sleeping, you're not eating, like I mean,
you've talked about this really blootlyate that, like you just
didn't basically sleep at all for several years while this
was going on. But an even bigger one that I
(11:33):
think I hear in your story is this idea that
failure can really affect our identity, like our sense of
who I was. And this seems to be a big
one in your story. You'd stepped away from this role
being a kind of a newsperson for ABC. You became
this kind of you know, co CEO of a company,
and now all of a sudden that identity seems to
be kind of falling apart or at least generating lots
of conflict. How did you handle that?
Speaker 2 (11:53):
Not well?
Speaker 3 (11:55):
And I do want to hear some stories from you
about I'm not aware of any failures and your empathy
set that they've happened. I want to I do want
to hear about them if you're comfortable talking about it.
But I will say that you've nailed it. I mean,
you're pointing at it. One of the big points of
struggle for me was the identity piece of this. It
was embarrassing to even though the struggle behind the scenes
(12:20):
lasted for nearly three years, it wasn't public, but you know,
the people in my life knew about it, and I
knew eventually it was going to be public, and I
was embarrassed. I'm supposed to be, you know, mister mindfulness,
and here I am embroiled in this you know, protracted conflict.
And yeah, I felt like a fraud, honestly, and I felt,
you know, very helpless that I couldn't wave a magic
(12:41):
wand and make this go away because there were two
parties at the table, and we had a lot of
contracts that we had signed that needed to be unwound,
and I couldn't just make things happen my way. And
so you know that I wasn't sleeping. I started having
panic attacks again, still dealing with the reverberations of that,
you know, the panic attacks this time really started to
(13:01):
come in situations of claustrophobia, which my shrink, my current shrink,
has had a field day with. And so you know,
I've still struggling to get on planes and in elevators
and I'm doing it.
Speaker 2 (13:12):
But you're absolutely right.
Speaker 3 (13:13):
It took a big toll, and especially on the identity front.
Not only did I feel embarrassed, as you know, a
mental health spokesperson of sorts, to be in this situation,
but as you mentioned, I had retired from ABC News.
Now about three years ago, and it was right after
I retired from the news that the problems started coming
(13:34):
up with my co founders, and so I no longer
had my news anchor identity, and now this app that
I had poured so much of myself into was is
no longer mine. And yeah, so that's all been very challenging.
Speaker 1 (13:47):
But one of the reasons we're having this conversation is
that you've managed to do really cool things from this
moment of kind of career earthquake, and also you've learned
a lot, and those are the kinds of learning so
that we're going to get to when the Happiness Lab
gets back from the break. Workplaces can be this sort
(14:17):
of spot that we generate lots and lots of happiness,
but they can also be these places where we experience failure.
So I think kind of looking really carefully at the
kinds of ways that we get failure wrong and the
ways that we can benefit from failure can be really important.
And I think one of the biggest teachings that it
sounds like you've come up with that you've talked about
on your show is this idea that even though failure
is really scary and it's got all these terrible elements.
(14:40):
It's not actually as bad as we think, like there
are benefits that can come from it. Explain what you mean.
Speaker 2 (14:44):
There many benefits.
Speaker 3 (14:46):
Many as somebody who fails regularly, I can tell you
there are many benefits. And I actually think that we
might even want to play with that word. I don't
know what an alternative is, but maybe it's something in
the range of experimentation.
Speaker 1 (15:00):
You know.
Speaker 3 (15:01):
I think we live in a pandemic of perfectionism, and
I'm sure you see this on campus with your students.
Perfectionism is really on the rise, and it is such
an insidious thing. People are unwilling to take risks because
they don't want to fail. A part that I think
this is because we live our lives so publicly on
social media, this kind of panopticon we've created for ourselves
(15:23):
where everybody can see what we're doing. We feel so
much pressure to present a curated, perfected version of ourselves,
when of course our lives aren't like that. And then
of course we're comparing ourselves to other people's lives that
seem perfect, and we know that we're a mess, and
so something must be uniquely wrong with us. And one
of the many, many pernicious impacts of this is that
(15:44):
people are unwilling often to take risks and to run experiments.
And a big part of running experiments and taking risks
is you're going to fail. But to reframe that, there's
a difference between humiliation and humility. You can be humbled
in a good way in that you've learned something about
yourself and about the world, as opposed to a humiliation
(16:06):
which kind of coils you up in and thoughts about yourself,
where you're stuck in shame, you're stuck in your own
as I sometimes say, and I think I said this
the last time I was on your show, that your
head's up your ass in a in a pretty profound way.
And I know that's kind of a gross image. But
when you're in that mode, it's hard to learn. But
(16:27):
when you can be in a mode of humility, or
to use a term from your milia, when you've got
a growth mindset, which is that you're willing to take
risks and a failure doesn't mean somehow you are unworthy
or perpetually incapable. It just means you learned a thing
(16:48):
and you can grow from it. Does that all land
for you, given what you know about the research.
Speaker 1 (16:53):
Yeah, completely. I mean I think the growth mindset idea
is really quite apt, right. I think we do often
enough kind of put the word yet at the end
of everything we do, right, you know, I, you know,
started a new meditation company and it hasn't really worked
out yet, Right. I quit my job and tried to
do something new in the field, but it hasn't worked
out yet. You know. Carol Dweck's research suggests just putting
(17:15):
that word yet at the end just completely reframes the
way you're thinking, right, because it's not like, well, I've
screwed up, you know, everything's over, I'm dead. It's like, oh,
it just hasn't clicked yet, Right, There's some time for
this to kind of work out, and I've learned something,
so I'm more likely to get it the next time
because I've sort of figured it out. I think that
mindset shift is kind of huge. I think another mindset
shift that's really big, and it seems like one that
(17:36):
you've embraced a bit, is just this idea that like
it's actually not as bad as we think, right, that like,
ultimately I'm probably going to be okay, Right, this sort
of stems from some of the lovely work by Dan
Gilbert and his colleagues about how bad we are what
he calls affective forecasting, which is just like predicting how
bad some bad event is actually going to be. We
have so many mechanisms in our mind to make it
(17:57):
go a little bit better that it's really never as
bad as we often think.
Speaker 2 (18:00):
That's so well said.
Speaker 3 (18:01):
You know, we've interviewed one another many times over the years,
but actually we haven't spent I don't think any time
in person, so I don't know.
Speaker 2 (18:10):
You that well.
Speaker 3 (18:11):
We have this kind of I have this kind of
parasocial relationship with you. But for observing you from a distance,
it seems like your career is just a progress of
strength to strength to strength. You know, starting this course,
which is the most popular course it's ever existed at Yale,
and then starting this podcast, which is so huge. But
(18:31):
have you encountered professional setbacks that you'd be comfortable talking about, Oh.
Speaker 1 (18:35):
My gosh, of course. I mean one of the biggest
ones was that, you know, as I was starting this
big class and starting this podcast and running a residential
college at Yale and doing all this work, I got
incredibly burned out, Like so burned out that I wound
up taking time off my role as being ahead of college,
which was embarrassing for all the reasons that you just
talked about. Right, I'm supposed to be the self help
(18:56):
grow and here I am completely burned out. And the
form of my burnout was a particular one, which is
that I got incredibly cynical. So these clinical psychologists who
talk about burnout often talk about these sort of three
features of burnout is the one we usually think about
where you're emotionally exhausted, And I was for sure that,
right you take a weekend off and you come back
Monday morning, you're just as depleted as when you'd started before,
(19:18):
Like I was feeling that, I was also feeling what
they call a sense of personal ineffectiveness. Then even if
I was doing my job perfectly, it kind of wouldn't
be good enough, or I wouldn't be proud of it.
This is all going down kind of at the tail
end of COVID, when just doing things on campus generally
wasn't very fun. But the particular insidious consequence of burnout
that I was experiencing that I was most embarrassed about
(19:41):
was what researcher is called depersonalization, which is kind of
just a form of cynicism, which is like everyone that
you work with and care about is getting on your
last nerve and you want to just explode on them
all the time. You even start viewing their intentions as
kind of evil or like just a pain in the ass.
And this was what I was experiencing with my students.
Right I'd get an email from a student who had
(20:02):
to get a root canal and needed some money from
the college to be able to do it, and my
instant reaction wasn't just like true compassion for this student,
which is what I like to think was the typical
reaction for most of my career. My reaction was like, oh,
what a pain in the ass, Like I have to
send these other emails. And when I started noticing this,
like at first I didn't want to tell anybody because
I felt kind of like a fraud. I felt a
(20:24):
little bit ashamed for having those emotions, right, Like, I'm
supposed to be in this role where I have uttered
compassion for the students in my community, and I wasn't
feeling it. But I think in part because of my
training in some of this stuff. I'm mindful enough to
notice these signs, right, I'm like, wait a minute, this
is like a huge flashing emotional signal that's not supposed
to be there. That's telling me I'm overwhelmed and I
(20:45):
need to take some time off. So yeah, at the
kind of realizing that I stepped away from my role
as a head of college on campus, not as public
that use. It wasn't like on live TV, but I
had a front page New York Times magazine article about
like happiness professor burned out And got a call from
my mother in law who was like, were you gonna
tell us that you're like stepping away from your role
(21:06):
and taking a year off? So yeah, So you know,
I think we all have our own forms of what
feels like failure, what feels like us not living up
to our ideals. And that was definitely a moment for
me where I was feeling that way. So I can
relate to the F word, but not the F word
we keep talking about the failure effort.
Speaker 3 (21:26):
That's an incredible story. I hope this doesn't sound wrong,
but I'm like proud of you for telling it. I
don't mean that in a patronizing way at all. It's
just it's like very brave. Other than taking time off,
what helped you pull out of it?
Speaker 1 (21:41):
Well, taking time off was huge, and I took time
off in a big way, Like I just left Yale
for a year. I moved to Boston, just like Hold
Up with Friends just kind of restructured my life around
thinking about the podcast and stuff, but not doing a
lot of my professorial work. And that changed a lot,
you know. I mean therapy was part of it too, right,
as like you know, as it always is, but it
(22:02):
was really trying to focus on like what have I
been telling everybody to do? And what would I tell
myself in this situation? And for me, I think the difference,
Whichhich kind of gets back to a lot of the
stuff that you've talked about was that, you know, it
was the normal stuff that I teach students, these behavioral changes,
right like engage in more social connection and you know,
exercise and try to focus on your sleep. But a
lot of it was changes to my self talk, right,
(22:24):
A lot of it was changes to kind of that
crappy drill sergeant voice in my head telling me I
have to be the perfect happiness expert. All the time,
I was like, you know, embracing Kristin nef self compassion
work in a huge, huge way, and that honestly was
a lot of what has helped a lot, right and
just one of the reasons I feel like I've overcome
my burnout enough to kind of get back into the
(22:45):
classroom and do more work at Yale and really kind
of get back to this work in a different way.
Speaker 3 (22:50):
It's a big deal that you're talking about this publicly
modeling failure and the resilience. I just don't want that
to slip by. It's awesome that you've done it and
now you're back in the classroom.
Speaker 2 (23:02):
That's a huge deal.
Speaker 3 (23:05):
I also just want to, you know, plus one on
the work of Kristin Nef self Compassion, which always scanned
to me as a you know, I'm going to use
some social justice boiler plate here, but always scanned to
me as you know, as a heteronormative cis mail as
beyond the pale cheesy. But you know, one of the
(23:26):
amazing things that Kristen's done is muster a pretty convincing
amount of research backing for the argument that if you
can learn to talk to yourself the way you would
talk to a good friend. You know, it can make
you much more effective.
Speaker 1 (23:42):
We've talked about this on the podcast before, but I
can help say. My favorite example of Kristin Nef's work
that I think really shows how powerful and how not
kind of wooy this sort of technique is is her
lovely work showing that if you teach self compassion techniques
to combat veterans, they're less likely to get PTSD. And
I love the study because it gets around what I
(24:02):
sometimes find is a challenge talking about the self compassion work,
which is that it has really crappy marketing. We're being
really it sounds sort of like fluffy and self compassion
y and like you're going to talk to yourself like
a friend. And I remember talking about this work in
front of folks from the military. I was doing a
talk for Navy seals and you could see the faces
in the audience where I'm putting this up of like,
(24:24):
you know, talk to yoursel it's all about self kindness,
and they're rolling their eyes. But then you show the
data where it's like, actually, when you train folks in
the military to be a bit more mindful to kind
of stop the drill sergeant in their head even though
they're listening to the drill sergeant on the field. Now,
all of a sudden, they start performing better, they wind
up healthier in the face of true conflict and really
terrible circumstances. Now it starts to seem less kind of
(24:45):
woo woo and a little bit more like sciencey and
in the trenches.
Speaker 3 (24:49):
But absolutely, and for me it's again as somebody who's
probably who's factory settings are closer to somebody who's in
the military, although physically I never would have cut it
in the military, but I'm a little bit, you know,
psychologically closer to that. It's not so much the self kindness,
the self compassion of it all sounded vaguely auto erotic
(25:09):
to me.
Speaker 2 (25:09):
It was more like.
Speaker 3 (25:13):
Switching up from an inner drill sergeant to an inner coach.
And we've all had good coaches, and they don't shy
away from pointing out where our flaws are and when
we've made mistakes. But they're just not assholes about it.
And that's that's what's being called for here, not some
sort of gooey gooey you know, staring in the mirror
(25:33):
and talking to yourself and kissing the mirror and talking
about how great you are. It's really about having a
dry eyed, clear eyed, but warm sense of self appraisal
and talking yourself through it again the way you would
with your kid or a good friend if they called
you in a moment where they were in extremis And
that's really helpful. And I would add on top of this,
(25:54):
and I'm sure you know his work way better than
I do, but I have found as a supplement to
Kristin Neff's work, and this is all very relevant to
how you talk to yourself and failure is Ethan Cross
from the University of Michigan and all of the work
he's done specifically looking at how to most effectively talk
to yourself.
Speaker 1 (26:12):
Yeah, and just the simple way that you can do
that by using your own name or as I know
you do, Dan, not Dan, but dude, Hey, dude, what
are you doing. It's fine, It's gonna be all right.
Let's take a long view. It's probably not as bad
as you think, right. Yeah, those types of techniques have
been have been really really huge for me too. Another
one that I know you've talked a lot about in
(26:33):
the podcast, so I think is something that's resonated with
both of our stories of failure is how you navigate
negative emotions and whether you allow them in I think
I wouldn't be in a healthier place than I was
when I was feeling my maximill burnout right now if
I didn't really allow the emotion of overwhelm, if I
didn't like sit with it and notice it, which is
(26:55):
definitely not my instinct right as like a you know,
hardcore type a academic at an ivy League university. I'm
a very kind of stiff upper lips, squish that emotion down.
This is very inconvenient. I'm gonna ignore it and sort
of power through. But like, actually noticing how depleted I
was feeling, as awful as it was feeling, was sort
of really essential for kind of getting better. And my
(27:17):
understanding is that this has been part of your story too,
this idea of kind of embracing those negative emotions rather
than running away from them.
Speaker 3 (27:25):
Absolutely. I'm curious, like what modalities did you use? Was
it therapy, was it meditation? Did what were your practices
that helped you like not be at war with your
own inner reality?
Speaker 1 (27:37):
Partly therapy, partly a lot of this just focus on
noticing what my thought patterns were. That hasn't for me
come so much through like more formal meditation practices, but
a lot of these sort of maybe informal self talk
practices of just kind of noticing it. I think I
mostly felt it in my body right. It was sort
of helpful that this was during COVID time and you're
sort of trapped in your house. I feel like I
(27:57):
was able to notice my body more. I wasn't traveling
around and do it. I wasn't as busy kind of
as in the typical way that I was, and so
it just helped to sort of notice that a little
bit more. But yeah, for me, it was pretty body
to just kind of feel it and notice it.
Speaker 3 (28:11):
Yeah, I mean that'll to me that all sounds great.
I know that I'm known, as to the extent that
anybody knows who I am, as kind of mister meditation,
and I really am a deep believer in the power
of the practice. But I'm not a meditation fundamentalist. What
I would say, however, in this regard, in this particular
sphere of being able to sit with your emotions, which
(28:35):
is a really counterintuitive but powerful skill meditation for me,
has been a it is a it goes right at
that is it is with extreme prejudice, it goes right
at this value proposition of being able to weather your
own internal storms by giving you a set of tools
to sit in the middle of it without being owned
(28:57):
by it. One little phrase that might be useful that
people could use as an inner slogan or a mantra
in this regard, whether you meditate or not, is And
this comes from my meditation teacher, Joseph Goldstein, who's, in
my opinion, just a brilliant, brilliant human being, and he
teaches with these little phrases, these little slogans that are
(29:19):
kind of like earworms, and for me, they really come
up in moments when I need them. And so this
one is going to sound very basic and simple, but
it's profound and it is this it's okay.
Speaker 2 (29:33):
Now.
Speaker 3 (29:33):
This does not mean everything's okay. It means it's okay
to feel what you're feeling right now you can handle
it instead of pushing it away, which doesn't work, or
getting overwhelmed by it and acting out of it, meaning
inviting in the anger and then nurturing it and living
(29:54):
in that space for twenty years or whatever. It just
means that, you know, the half life of an emotion
is whatever, forty five you probably know there's like forty
five seconds or something like that. We tend to make
the emotion last for days, years, a lifetime. But actually,
if you just tell yourself it's okay, I can feel
this anger right now, it will naturally come and go
(30:14):
and there is extraordinary freedom on the other side of it.
Speaker 2 (30:18):
Would you realize, Okay, I didn't do anything.
Speaker 3 (30:20):
I didn't say the thing that's going to ruin the
next forty eight hours of my marriage. Or my son
and I are in a hotel room right now, and
we ordered crow nuts because we're in Vegas, and they
delivered cronuts to the room, and I'm looking at a
crow nut right now, And if I was angry and
not aware of it or unwilling to sit with it,
I might just eat the whole cronut right which again,
I don't want to make food sinful or anything like that.
(30:42):
But you can do lots of things that won't feel
good ultimately, like say something pointed to somebody, or eat
when you're not hungry, and instead it's okay, Like I
can just feel this discomfort for forty five seconds or
however long it lasts. It will pass. It'll probably come
back again, but it will pass. And once it's passed,
(31:03):
you can make better decisions and you can also see
that you can survive more than you think.
Speaker 1 (31:09):
I love It's okay. Can I tell you my latest
earworm that I'm loving a lot. It comes from the
clinical psychologist Ellen Hendrickson, who has this great new book
called How to Be Enough. But she says we have
to go less frozen and more beetles. That when we
think of dealing with our negative emotions, we want to
let it go, but we have to let it be.
I love this idea because I've never been a huge
(31:30):
frozen fan. So less frozen, more beetles, not let it go,
let it be, because I think this is idea is
we think we'll just like get rid of those emotions
or try to toss them out. But the sad thing
is that the real practice is being like, Nope, I'm
just gonna hang out with you and I'm not gonna run.
I'm just gonna let you take your course. And that
can be super scary, and our instinct is just to
(31:51):
squish it down and push it away. But it's really
the act of sitting through the emotion that allows us
to get through it, and sometimes that allows us to
see that the emotion we thought it was isn't exactly
what it was. And I know this is something you
talked a lot about in kind of your career Earthquake.
Is that the the first presentation of a lot of
the emotions you were dealing with was anger, anger at
(32:13):
the company, anger at the situation or the contract or whatever.
But what did you find out when you sat with
the anger? Did it stay anger all the time?
Speaker 3 (32:20):
That's a great question. First of all, just to say
I love Ellen Hendrickson.
Speaker 2 (32:23):
Two.
Speaker 3 (32:24):
I didn't know she had a new book, so I
need to get her on my show. But she wrote
a book years ago about social anxiety that I still
quote to people who are struggling with that. Yes, anger,
For me, when I sat with it, I realized that
it's often described as a secondary emotion, as you know,
so it's often covering up for something else. And for me,
(32:49):
if I could muster the wherewithal to sit with the
discomfort of the anger, I could see that underneath it
was fear, and that's a hard thing. Again, It just
kind of kind of goes back to how masculinity can
manifest I know from men, from many men, like, we
don't want to admit that we're scared, and so anger
(33:09):
is a much more comfortable place to be. A friend
of mine once joke that he had two emotional gears,
anger and self pity, And I really see myself in that.
But you know, as painful as it is, it's better,
I think, to tune into what's really going on than
to just be stuck in the anger, because you're much
(33:29):
less likely I in my experience, to get to resolution
if you stay in the anger, but to tune into
the fear, Like what am I worried about? I'm worried
about all the identity stuff that you brought up earlier.
What is this all going to say about me? I'm
worried about. Am I going to you know, am I
going to have to like sell the house and move
my family somewhere else? Lots of things I was worried about,
(33:52):
and I have, you know, for me, this is actually
something that makes failure such a fraught issue, especially at work.
I have this, really, I think, this really deep ancestral
fear of destitution and it's totally irrational. I am absolutely
(34:15):
comfortable financially. I was raised, I have had every advantage
that is available, except for maybe the fact that I'm
not tall. But you know, white straight male raised by
loving parents who were upper middle class, was able to
go to college, all of the advantages, and yet just
I have this nagging, irrational fear about running out of money.
(34:36):
And have learned later in life that I had a
great grandfather. His name is Arthur LAbau was Leebuwitz, but
he changed it to Lebau because it wasn't a great
place for Jews in the early nineteen hundreds and the
United States wasn't and he wanted to sound French. And
he was a total like huckster, and you had a
(34:58):
series of failed businesses and that ultimately became a bail bondsman,
but a corrupt one, and was putting up his family members'
houses as collateral for these crooks to get out out
of jail. And one of them skip bond, and this guy,
the FBI swooped in, and I might I found a
bunch of articles about this, Like the FBI swooped in.
My great grandmother had to like testify in federal court
(35:21):
and Arthur Lebau took his own life in the family
kitchen and his daughter's found h Yeah, and that dude's
energy is in my veins. And that's just the best
explanation I can come up with for why I, or
at least part of why this is such a bugaboo
for me.
Speaker 2 (35:40):
And so in.
Speaker 3 (35:42):
Failure, I've had the opportunity to get a little bit
closer to this dude. And and for me, what's really
helpful is to be like, when I see him rearing
his head.
Speaker 2 (35:56):
Thank you, you know, thank you? This is I don't,
I don't.
Speaker 3 (36:00):
You're giving me shitty ideas I'm not going to hopefully
I'm not going to act on them. But the impulse
is as one of the great meditation teachers I know,
a guy named Jack Pornfield, the impulse is just the
organism trying to protect itself.
Speaker 2 (36:12):
Right.
Speaker 3 (36:12):
So it fundamentally is a helpful instinct to have all
this fear or to be like us hustling all the
time to make sure that my career is in a
good place. But over time, as I've been able to
make peace with this character, internally, I'm less owned by him.
It's a kind of radical disarmament. Does all of that
(36:34):
make sense to you?
Speaker 1 (36:35):
No, totally. I think there are two things in there
that really fit with the science, right. The first is
this idea of kind of having gratitude for this belief
that's otherwise kind of causing this terrible scarcity mindset, maybe
because of you to make bad decisions. But if your
instinct was to hate it, which I'm sure it probably
is your natural instinct, but if you kind of went
with that instinct to hate it and you're just angry
at it the whole time, like you wouldn't ever be
(36:56):
able to kind of look at it and allow it
and see what it's doing. So kind of embracing it
with gratitude is a really great strategy, right. It kind
of allows you to look at it and really deal
with that belief and sort of ask the question is
it really useful to you? It's trying to help you,
but is it really helping you? I think another really
the thing I really love about this story is that
by kind of putting that in Leboo's words, that it's
(37:19):
his thought, it gives you some distance from that thought yourself. Right,
You're able to think of it as like that's a belief.
It's not an objective truth about the world. It's a
belief that I can sort of see the origin story
and you can almost label it as sort of one
of his beliefs, kind of, it's your ancestral belief right
it doesn't have to be yours right now. You can
pick and choose whether or not it's right for you.
And that's a sort of classic distancing strategy that you
(37:40):
get from cognitive behavioral therapy. You know, folks like work,
like folks from Ethan Cross and so on, and so
I think there's elements there that the science would really
line up with that. That's a great strategy.
Speaker 3 (37:51):
This is why it's always so great to talk to you,
because you can take my crazy shit and like give
it some scientific ovind here.
Speaker 2 (37:57):
It's true.
Speaker 1 (37:57):
That's that's what the researchers would say you should do. Anyway.
The final thing I want to talk to you that
I was really impressed with your story about failure is
this kind of optimism that you brought to it, at
least sort of in the end part of the process.
And you talked a lot about trying to sort of
embrace this whole situation with what you called radical optimism,
and so I'm curious if you could define what that
(38:17):
means and how it sort of played out in your story.
Speaker 2 (38:20):
You know, I don't I could.
Speaker 3 (38:22):
Anybody listening to this, including you can can fact check
me on this. But my understanding and really this comes
from interviewing a guy named Frederick Fairt p feer Dt,
who was an innovation ma is an innovation maybe in
at both Stanford and Google, and he talks about radical
optimism as the idea that failure and we talked about
(38:45):
this earlier is embedded in failure is progress if you
are willing to learn from it, so you can you
can launch a big project and for me, like I
just launched a big new project in the aftermath of
ten percent happier, the app not going my way and
in my sanest moments, in my most radically optimistic moment.
(39:09):
And this isn't like, this is not irrational optimism. This
is radical optimism, right, so it's actually evidence based, fact based,
reality based. I can tell myself the story that this
thing may not work, but I will have made progress
anyway because I will have learned for the next thing.
Speaker 1 (39:27):
I love that this comes from like all the Stanford
tech folks, because this has been kind of an ethos
that has never been kind of my mom but seems
to be on EMO that really works if you judge
from companies like Facebook and Google and so on, which
is like move fast and break things. Right. I'm cool
with the move fast, like that kind of fits with
my em pretty well. But the break things, I'm like,
oh that, But it's like explicit in that kind of
(39:49):
plan for how you live your life and come up
with ideas and so on, and inherent in that is
just the idea of what you were just saying, right,
which is that like you have to break things to
learn what actually works. If the thing just kind of
works perfectly the first time you design it, then you
haven't really learned much of anything in terms that'll matter
for your kind of product working well or in the
case of our own psychology, for and resilience moving forward.
Speaker 3 (40:10):
Yeah, I would say the one asterisk there is that
in my understanding, at least too often in the tech world,
they're breaking things and breaking people and acting you know,
maybe without you know, the highest integrity sometimes And so
this isn't about and I'm not saying this to you.
I'm saying it just to anybody who might be tempted
to misinterpret this. This isn't about you know, just being
(40:33):
a dick, or you know, or not giving a shit
about other people, or burning yourself out and other people out.
It's really like moving fast and break things. The way
I interpret it for myself is a willingness to fail,
a willingness to try things. And yeah, this is another
Silicon Valley cliche that I like to fail fast, to
(40:53):
try a bunch of stuff and then pivot quickly. And
there's this an enormous amount of resilience available to if
you're open to having aired.
Speaker 1 (41:03):
Yeah, and not to beat the crap out of yourself
when you do that, right, because it's hard to fail
fast if you're in the fetal position about what a
loser you are. Right. The trouble with Tigingy Duden is
that we cover so much ground that when I'm in
the position of summing up, it feels like there's a
lot to do. But I think first bullet point in
my sum up list is that you and I both
screw up a lot, and we like to learn from
(41:23):
our screw ups and then share what we learn with
lots of people and so thank you for helping me
out with that. But it seems like among the things
we've learned is that failure not as bad as we think,
lots of benefits we don't expect. If you're feeling terrified
about failure, that's probably just an affective forecasting error coming up.
But if you need tips to deal with failure, self compassion,
the catchup of all self talk strategies, it just makes
(41:46):
everything tastier and better. We need a little bit of
radical optimism so that we can kind of remember that
failure is probably not just not as bad as we think,
but also going to be really helpful. And beyond that,
we need some strategies to kind of really allow our
negative emotions and to remember that it's going to be okay.
You're the career journalist. What did I forget?
Speaker 3 (42:06):
I think that that was a perfect sum up, and
I would I did very quickly. One other thing, you know,
for people wanting to navigate failure successfully is make it
a team sport.
Speaker 2 (42:16):
You know, have people you can talk to about it.
Speaker 1 (42:19):
Super Dan, thanks so much for being so frank about
your failure and for helping me be so frank about mine.
This was an awesome episode.
Speaker 2 (42:25):
Thank you, Laurie. I love talking, and next.
Speaker 1 (42:27):
Time we're going to come back and talk more about
well being at work. We're going to focus more specifically
on the recommendations that came out on World Mental Health
Day about what we can do as individuals and maybe
also as employers to make sure we're thriving at work.
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