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Hey everyone, this is Molly and Matt and we re the hosts of Grown Up Stuff How to Adult, a podcast from Ruby Studio and iHeart Podcasts.
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I think envy is the thief of joy.
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Where we run into problems is when we stop admiring those people and we start wanting what they have, or feeling like, I should have gotten what they got.
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Organizational psychologists want to bring in best-selling author, Wharton s number one professor, Adam Grant.
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I think that s people saying, I m stuck.
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I feel like my life isn t going anywhere.
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I feel like I m squandering my potential.
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That s a travesty.
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Growth is part of how you feel like you re using your time well.
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The person you re competing with is your past self, and the bar you re raising is for your future self.
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Before we jump into this episode, I d like to invite you to join this community to hear more interviews that will help you become happier, healthier, and more healed.
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It s incredible to see all your comments, and we re just getting started.
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Thank you so much for subscribing.
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It means the world to me.
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The best-selling author and host.
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The number one health and wellness podcast.
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On Purpose with Jay Shetty.
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Hey everyone, welcome back to On Purpose, the number one health podcast in the world.
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Thanks to each and every one of you that come back every week to listen, learn and grow.
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Now you know that this podcast is all about how we can do better individually, collectively, grow with new ideas, new insights, how we can develop new habits.
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habits, challenge our mindsets, and extend our capacity for goodness and greatness in our lives.
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And today s guest is truly an expert and someone who s deeply obsessed and studied about these themes and subjects for a long, long time.
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Someone I love having on the show.
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I m so grateful that he s returning on the show today.
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I m talking about the one and only Adam Grant, an organizational psychologist at Wharton, where Adam has been the top rated professor for seven straight years.
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Adam s books have sold millions of copies, and Adam s TED talks have been viewed more than 30 million times, and he hosts the hit podcast, Rethinking.
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Adam s pioneering research on motivation and meaning has enabled people to reach their aspirations and exceed others  expectations, and his new book,
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is called Hidden Potential, The Science of Achieving Greater Things.
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I highly recommend you grab a copy of this book.
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This is what we re diving into today.
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So if you love this conversation, you ll love the book because it will go so much deeper.
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Check it out.
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Adam, thank you so much for joining me.
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Wow.
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Thanks for that, Jay.
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I feel like I should just leave now.
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Leave now.
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This is it.
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We just peaked right there.
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Honestly, though, I was saying to you, it s so nice to meet you in person because I ve admired your work.
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I ve read your books.
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We ve had an interview before.
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You ve been so collaborative on offline about different things that come up, ideas, projects.
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And I really appreciate that because, you know, we re all busy.
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We ve all got a million things going on and you find a way to be personal and present even in those.
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So thank you so much.
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I appreciate it.
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I wish I could say it was on purpose, but it s an accident.
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I mentioned this offline, I m going to say it again, your book s called Hidden Potential, but I remember on our last conversation I was kind of saying, you know, I d love to one day study something deeply, potentially do a master s or a PhD.
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I love the idea of obsessing over something for a long period of time and you kind of, as you just said in your words, well I ll let you say it, you encouraged me
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And I was like, well, if Adam believes I could do something like this, maybe I can.
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So you were tapping into my hidden potential years before this book came out.
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It was only hidden to you.
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First of all, there s no way that studying behavioral economics or neuroscience or psychology or any of the topics that interest you is anywhere near as hard as becoming a monk.
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So that was just the beginning, but I think you might have, you suggested that I was planting a seed.
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The seed was already growing, it just needed a little bit of extra water and sunlight, but I m still waiting.
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I m still waiting for you to apply.
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You re waiting, you re waiting.
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It ll happen.
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It will happen, it will happen.
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I want to talk about, so, you know, the subtitle of the book is The Science of Achieving Greater Things.
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And it s all about getting better at getting better.
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Why is getting better important?
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Like why is growth important?
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And I know it sounds, it may sound like a stupid question.
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It may sound like a silly thing to talk about, especially on a show like this.
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But I find that people I talk to sometimes idolize being average.
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They think it s good enough.
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Good enough is good.
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I find that we are wired often to want things to stay exactly the same.
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we like how they are why should we get better why should anything get better we should be satisfied with what we have and often in the guise of contentment and peace there s a sense of lethargy and complacency that well we don t need to grow because you re just being greedy.
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So I m presenting a spectrum of ideas there I m happy for you to dive into any of those but why does getting better and improving matter at all?
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Fascinating.
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Nobody s ever asked me that before.
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And I frankly, I think I ve taken for granted that growth is just intrinsically enjoyable and motivating.
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I mean, I think you ve made a case that maybe some people are not motivated by growth.
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I think that where I might push back on that is to say we live in a world that glorifies performance.
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So, you know, people feel like if they want to be respected or celebrated, they need to win a medal.
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They need to earn a trophy.
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They need to get an A plus.
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And I think what we ve lost sight of is that what people actually enjoy is a sense of progress, feeling like they have forward momentum.
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When I think about what does it look like to not grow?
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I don t think for most people that s good enough.
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I think that s stagnation.
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I think that s people saying I m stuck.
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I feel like my life isn t going anywhere.
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I feel like I m squandering my potential.
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And I just, I think that s a travesty.
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And so I think growth is, is part of how you feel like you re using your time well.
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Absolutely, I completely agree with you and I m glad no one s ever asked you that before because I think I m like that too.
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I kind of take for granted that I love growth and I love the idea of being better and improving and I can t remember, I mean it s been said a million times, it s like an age-old quote but it goes, you know, if you re not growing you re dying and I think that s the point that we are either moving forward or we re moving backward.
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We re either getting faster and smarter or we re getting slower and not smarter and I think
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when you recognize that idea that there is no staying the same there is no we re just going to stay on this place and platform forever you start recognizing oh i have to move forward and the pace at which i move how have you guided people with that i found like often we compare our pace
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of growth and our pace of becoming better.
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And that s the hardest one because you re like, well, they got that body in three months or, you know, you ve been the top rated professor for seven years.
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Like I ve only won that once or whatever it may be.
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Pace of growth.
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How have you thought about pace of growth in your work?
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For a long time, I believed the saying, the mantra that comparison is the thief of joy.
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I don t believe it anymore.
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I think envy is the thief of joy.
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I think social comparison is invaluable.
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I think we have to look to other people for inspiration.
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I think we look to other people for learning, you know, not just what am I capable of, but also how do I get there?
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I think where we run into problems is when we stop admiring those people and we start wanting what they have or feeling like I should have gotten what they got.
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And I think there, what s probably helpful is to make a different set of comparisons.
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Part of what you could do is not think so much about pace, maybe focus more on starting points.
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So maybe somebody who s growing faster than you actually just started with more advantages than you did, and you ve traveled a greater distance.
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I don t think we pay enough attention to that would be one thought.
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I think obviously comparing to ourselves is helpful too.
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And I think that, you know, so often when it comes to benchmarking progress, I want to tell people, okay, the person you re competing with is your past self and the bar you re raising is for your future self.
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And if you can focus on that, it s a little bit easier to realize, all right, yeah, everybody has a different starting point.
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Everybody has a different pace, but
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If I could tell, actually, let me say this.
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I think so many people let their expectations rise with their progress.
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And so you set a goal today, you achieve it in six months.
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And then by the time it happens, it s almost a relief.
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I didn t blow it.
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Definitely.
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There s no joy.
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There s no sense of meaning and purpose.
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You sort of expected it and you would have been disappointed if it didn t happen.
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I think the way you avoid that is you get in touch with your past self.
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And you say, if, you know, if six months ago me or five years ago me knew where I would land now, how proud would I have been?
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How excited would I have been?
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And if you keep that past self in mind, it s much easier to appreciate the, I guess, the strides that you re making.
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I love that distinction you made as well between
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how comparison versus envy is the thief of joy.
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I think it s so subtle but it s so nuanced and so powerful because you re so right that I always think of it in the same way that you either study someone or you envy them and often the deeper you study someone the less you ll envy them because you ll actually realize how far they ve come and what they had to get through and challenges they had and you start getting the energy from that study to say oh maybe I have that within me too and maybe I can find that within me too because I have challenges.
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I think for me a really concrete example of that was I was I was terrified of public speaking when I decided to become a professor Maybe it was the wrong profession But I remember even being a student and thinking about raising my hand in college and I would start to physically shake and By the time I got called on sometimes I would like
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I would forget what I was going to say, or I d second guess it, or I d stumble and stammer my way through it.
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And so the idea that I was now going to stand in front of a whole classroom or on a big stage was extremely daunting.
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So what did I do?
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I went to speakers that I really admired and started studying them, thinking this is going to help me.
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And the first one I picked was MLK.
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Great pig, really, really.
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Yeah, I mean, what a great way to get demoralized.
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So I watched his dream speech.
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I tried to take notes on, you know, on things I could learn from him.
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You know, I wanted to know, well, how did he get there?
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And so I start reading about it.
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He s 34 years old when he gives that speech.
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I might as well quit.
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I cannot believe it s the greatest speech in American history, you know, done by somebody who s, you know, not even close to his prime.
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And I think if I had stopped there, I would have quit.
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And it would have been easy to walk away from MLK as just an impossible role model.
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And let s be clear, he is an impossible role model.
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I could work on public speaking for an infinite number of years, every minute of every day, and never come close to that.
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What was helpful, though, was then sort of rewinding and realizing we usually see our role models at their peak.
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And we don t have the starting point.
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We don t have the distance they ve traveled.
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So how did MLK get here?
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And it turns out he started entering public speaking competitions when he was 15 years old.
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That was two decades of practice.
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The year he did his dream speech, he gave over 350 talks.
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And so, you know, if you think about the cumulative progress that was made, that s multiple lifetimes, you know, of effort.
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So I think that s the kind of sort of analysis that we need to do.
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And I don t think most of us do that.
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Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.
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I can t believe, I can t remember exactly what it was.
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I ll have to find it, but it was, I think it was Usain Bolt who said something like, I ve worked for X amount of hours to run 10 seconds or something like that, right?
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Like the idea of he s practiced for all these hours or months or years to run something in however long he did it.
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And I forgot the exact number, but it s so interesting what you re saying and that, that backstory of,
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that journey, that growth, the skills development, the hours, the struggle, 300 that year alone is brutal.
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That s insane and I think it s fascinating.
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You talk about this, I want to read from the book a bit if you don t mind.
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So there are a couple of things that I picked out.
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So this is page 26 for anyone who s listening or watching right now, page 26 of Hidden Potential.
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Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet.
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Only through experiences of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, vision cleared, ambition inspired and success achieved.
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You re quoting Helen Keller.
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And then you go on to say that summoning the nerve to face discomfort is a character skill.
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The way you were writing in this book was so empowering
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because it was almost like you were pulling from you know I know of course everything s highly researched everything s backed with science but you were kind of pulling from a bit of a Martin Luther King space there like the language in there of like summoning the nerve to face discomfort is a character skill and so you re actually saying what we just talked about with MLK that doing hard things, doing uncomfortable things, doing difficult things is actually where so much of this ability for hidden potential comes from
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But all of us shy away from it.
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All of us don t want to do it.
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We re scared of it.
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You becoming a professor, that s scary if you don t like public speaking.
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We avoid discomfort, we avoid awkwardness, we avoid challenges.
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How do we summon the nerve to face discomfort?
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Well, clearly what I did was I started by thinking, okay, writing this book is going to be uncomfortable.
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There are going to be a lot of times when I m going to get stuck, when I m going to feel like this chapter is not working, and then my writing is not working, and then I m not capable of being a writer.
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Why did I ever think I could become a writer?
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And then that just spirals out of control.
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And then the antidote to that is to think, you know what?
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Jay Shetty needs to be empowered.
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I love this image of you getting empowerment.
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I do get empowered.
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I would never think of you as somebody who is in need of that.
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You re out empowering lots of other people.
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Always in need.
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I guess for me, one of the things I learned from the research that I didn t know before, I think I always understood intuitively the idea that discomfort is key to growth.
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What I didn t understand was that actively seeking discomfort and even amplifying it was one of the ways that you could move toward your idea of progress.
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I kind of saw it as a necessary evil, something that happens when you re learning and you re struggling and you re tinkering with new skills.
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I think what the evidence shows is that people who are actually given the goal to intentionally feel uncomfortable, this is done in some cases, asking people to go on stage to do improv comedy and literally feel awkward on purpose.
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They end up growing more from that experience because they put themselves in situations that challenge them.
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And so I think that s what I had to do with public speaking when I was starting to teach is therapists talk about exposure therapy and they often recommend systematic desensitization to say, all right, let s start, you know, little seminar and then, you know, get to know a group of students well, and then you can kind of build from there.
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I didn t have time for that.
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So I went to the opposite extreme of flooding and said, all right, I m just going to volunteer to give guest lectures in front of huge classrooms of hundreds of students who I ve never met before for my friends  classes.
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I don t know why they let me in.
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I don t know why they, I just volunteered.
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Yeah, they were overly good friends maybe.
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They were sacrificing the whole class for my growth, but extremely uncomfortable for me.
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And I remember, you know, just walking in and feeling like I do not belong here.
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I m not qualified.
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It was a massive case of imposter syndrome.
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But I think one of the things that happened when I put myself in that uncomfortable situation is I realized,
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it s not really going to go worse than it did today.
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And reading through the, you know, the comments, there were lots of suggestions for improvement and lots of criticisms, but there were also, you know, little compliments about things people liked.
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It s like, okay, I can build on that.
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I can work on this.
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And, um, I think, you know, just coming in with the goal, yeah, I should put myself in a deliberately uncomfortable situation.
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Um, it opened me to a much,
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steeper learning curve than if I d done the kind of let me dip my toe in the shallow end and then sort of take off the floaties and learn to swim one step at a time.
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Yeah, and I feel it s really interesting, right?
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Do you think there are those two approaches?
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Like do you think from the research you ve done and even your own personal experience, do you feel like it is either or like sometimes you just jump in the deep end and sometimes you should kind of dip your toe in and then walk in or do you think it s either or like or is wisdom knowing which one to try when?
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That s where I was going to land.
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I haven t seen a good comparison of the two and when you should do each, but that s my intuition as well, is I think there s a time and a place for both approaches.
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And probably most of the time we want to be somewhere in the middle.
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But to the point that you made earlier, I think most of us err too far on the side of avoiding discomfort.
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And so we make these very small incremental steps.
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And one, it feels like we re not making progress, which is frustrating.
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And then two, we often then don t take enough risks or try enough experiments to really stretch ourselves and move up to the next level.
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Yeah, definitely.
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One of the things I find that I always do, if I get curious about something, it could be a sport, it could be a subject, it could be a topic, whatever it may be, I ll kind of cancel everything on the weekend and just obsess about it for a weekend.
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All in.
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Because it gives me a sense of
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momentum or growth or a sense of yeah that s not my thing and I can very quickly decide whether to invest more time in it whereas if I was to have booked a six-week course or a program on something I may find by week three that this isn t something I want to study for six weeks as opposed to I could have figured that out in 24 hours if I just really obsessed about it.
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Or if I ll play a sport and I m thinking, oh, I like this sport, should I play it more?
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Let me play it for a whole weekend, every hour that I m awake and see whether it fulfills me or whether it s draining and tiring.
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And I feel like that s kind of what you re saying works as a better experiment.
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Yeah, I think that kind of immersion is a really efficient way to figure out, is this an area that I want to try to keep growing in?
2
SPEAKER_00
I think the one thing I d want to be careful about there is there s some evidence to suggest that oftentimes we only like things when we become good at them.
2
SPEAKER_00
That s true.
2
SPEAKER_00
If you spend a weekend on a skill that you re terrible at, you might quit it prematurely because you just haven t built up enough competence.
2
SPEAKER_00
Golf.
2
SPEAKER_00
I was just going to say, the day I spent swinging a golf club, I ve never felt so incapable in my life.
2
SPEAKER_00
Same.
2
SPEAKER_00
Also, golf is not a real sport.
2
SPEAKER_00
So I had no problems walking away from that one.
2
SPEAKER_00
Explain that.
2
SPEAKER_00
I think I ll offend too many people.
2
SPEAKER_01
I think so too.
2
SPEAKER_00
That s hilarious.
2
SPEAKER_00
No, but I think sometimes you do have to say, all right, this could take me a couple of weeks or a couple of months where, you know, I build enough competence to really experience the joy of it.
2
SPEAKER_00
Like I ve seen this with, um, I actually went through this with tennis.
2
SPEAKER_00
Um, I think I took tennis lessons when, you know, when I was four or five and I really disliked it and, you know, ended up convincing my mom that I should quit.
2
SPEAKER_00
And then when I picked it up again around 11 or 12, I had better hand eye coordination.
2
SPEAKER_00
I d played a bunch of ping pong and,
2
SPEAKER_00
like now it was decent enough at a racket sport, the tennis was actually fun and I think that s probably relevant to many skills.
2
SPEAKER_01
Absolutely, absolutely.
2
SPEAKER_01
So people always ask me and I m sure you get asked this question a million times, of course you do, you have your own book club too, like which you ve been kindly featured me in the past and
2
SPEAKER_01
People always ask me, what should I read?
2
SPEAKER_01
And my number one response to that is, well, what are you struggling with?
2
SPEAKER_01
Because I read for what I m struggling with.
2
SPEAKER_01
That s how I choose.
2
SPEAKER_01
I always say to people, you don t go to the grocery store because your refrigerator is full of milk.
2
SPEAKER_01
You go when you re out of milk or you re out of cheese or you re out of bread and you go and stock up.
2
SPEAKER_01
And so I ll often do an audit of my internal unit and go, well, what am I feeling like I don t have?
2
SPEAKER_01
And I ve talked about how a couple of years ago I was building my team and I realized that
2
SPEAKER_01
being a leader and a recruiter were very different skills and recruitment wasn t a strength that I possessed.
2
SPEAKER_01
And I almost assumed that because I was good at certain things that I should be good at recruiting and I wasn t.
2
SPEAKER_01
And I studied Daniel Coyle s book, The Culture Code, which I love.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, it s fantastic.
2
SPEAKER_01
And I interviewed him on the show too and looked at his playbook and everything else.
2
SPEAKER_01
And that one book in and of itself made me better at recruitment.
2
SPEAKER_01
And so I always look at it that way.
2
SPEAKER_01
But how do people figure out what they re struggling with or what they re not good at or what they need to get better at is probably the right way to put it.
2
SPEAKER_01
Because we have so many things we re not good at.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
2
SPEAKER_01
What do we know what we need to get better at?
2
SPEAKER_00
This should have been a chapter in Hidden Potential.
2
SPEAKER_00
Where were you, Jay Shetty, while I was writing this book?
2
SPEAKER_00
That would have been really helpful.
2
SPEAKER_00
Maybe it ll go in the paperback.
2
SPEAKER_00
My first thought is I always want to look to my Achilles heel.
2
SPEAKER_00
What s the one thing that s holding me back from a goal that I care about or a value that I m trying to pursue?
2
SPEAKER_00
And then the other is, what s an area of passion or curiosity that I m excited to spend more time investing in?
2
SPEAKER_00
And sometimes that s for me, because I m excited about it.
2
SPEAKER_00
Other times it s because I want to help somebody else.
2
SPEAKER_00
And I think those are reasonable questions to ask.
2
SPEAKER_00
I think
2
SPEAKER_00
Where a lot of people struggle is they know the domain already, right?
2
SPEAKER_00
So they ve decided, I want to be a better entrepreneur, or I want to be a better artist, or I m interested in improving my coding skills, right?
2
SPEAKER_00
And they ve kind of already figured out what part of life they re trying to improve at, but then they don t know what to focus on from there.
2
SPEAKER_00
I think the mistake that a lot of us make is we end up asking the people around us that we trust for feedback.
2
SPEAKER_00
Which is a perfectly reasonable thing to do, except when you ask for feedback, you get a lot of cheerleaders and critics.
2
SPEAKER_00
The cheerleaders are basically applauding your best self, and the critics are attacking your worst self.
2
SPEAKER_00
And the critics leave you often demoralized, and the cheerleaders can make you complacent.
2
SPEAKER_00
What you want as a coach, a good coach is somebody who sees your potential and then helps you become a better version of yourself.
2
SPEAKER_00
And so one of the things I learned through doing research for the book is that instead of asking for feedback, it s often better to seek advice.
2
SPEAKER_00
So feedback leads people to think about what you did right or wrong yesterday.
2
SPEAKER_00
Advice helps people focus on what you can do better tomorrow.
2
SPEAKER_00
So the way I would like to, I guess that I apply this personally is when I m trying to figure out where I need to grow,
2
SPEAKER_00
every time I get off stage, for example, or every time I finish a podcast interview, I will ask the audience or the host, what s the one thing I can do better?
2
SPEAKER_00
Wow.
2
SPEAKER_00
Which is enormously helpful because they start to give concrete suggestions, but I m not immediately going to focus on the first thing that I hear.
2
SPEAKER_00
What I do is I ask a bunch of different people and then I look for the patterns.
2
SPEAKER_00
And I think that what too many people do is even if they get to the point of asking for advice rather than feedback,
2
SPEAKER_00
They start to hear all these things they need to work on.
2
SPEAKER_00
They re like, whoa, this is overload.
2
SPEAKER_00
It s too much.
2
SPEAKER_00
I can t handle any more.
2
SPEAKER_00
I can probably only improve one or two things at a time.
2
SPEAKER_00
What I would say to those people is when you feel a little bit overwhelmed by the number of suggestions you re getting, you should actually seek more of them because that will help you find the signal in the noise.
2
SPEAKER_00
That will help you sort of figure out what s one person s idiosyncratic taste and what is a bunch of people s
2
SPEAKER_00
you know, quality input.
2
SPEAKER_00
So I guess that s my favorite way to figure out where you need to grow.
2
SPEAKER_00
Ask a bunch of people for advice and then focus on the common themes.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, the patterns.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
2
SPEAKER_01
I m going to start doing that.
2
SPEAKER_01
I m going to try that out actually.
2
SPEAKER_01
Try it at your own risk.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
2
SPEAKER_01
I ve not practiced it in that way and I like that, again, distinction between advice and feedback.
2
SPEAKER_01
and you re so right if someone asks me for feedback your spot on my mind goes into right and wrong and you know weaknesses and strengths as opposed to reflecting on hey this could work really well or i love this style you have and it could work you know i think that s such a a great way to think about it and
2
SPEAKER_01
It s hard too because we do base so much of where we want to grow on what other people think we need to grow to.
2
SPEAKER_01
I wonder how we can get better at sitting with ourselves and reflecting on our days.
2
SPEAKER_01
I always loved that statement from Steve Jobs where he said that every couple of days I would look in the mirror and ask myself or reflect on if this was the life I wanted to live.
2
SPEAKER_01
Am I doing with my day what I d want to do?
2
SPEAKER_01
And if it wasn t, then I knew I needed to make a change.
2
SPEAKER_01
And that self-evaluation I think is such an important need because at the same time as listening to others, you need both.
2
SPEAKER_01
It s not an either or.
2
SPEAKER_01
How have you done the self-evaluation part as well from going to someone who was scared of giving talks to being one of TED s most prolific popular speakers of all time to obviously now traveling, book tours, events, everything else.
2
SPEAKER_01
How do you self-evaluate now as you were then?
2
SPEAKER_00
That s definitely been an evolution over the years.
2
SPEAKER_00
I think probably the most helpful thing that I learned came from another area where I struggled a lot earlier and probably based on my initial lack of talent should have quit, which was springboard diving.
2
SPEAKER_01
Springboard diving, right?
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
2
SPEAKER_00
I basically ended up diving because I didn t make the middle school basketball team or the high school soccer team.
2
SPEAKER_00
And I saw a lifeguard diving at a pool one day and was just mesmerized.
2
SPEAKER_00
I want to learn how to do that.
2
SPEAKER_00
Unfortunately, I walked like Frankenstein.
2
SPEAKER_00
I couldn t touch my toes without bending my knees.
2
SPEAKER_00
I could hardly jump.
2
SPEAKER_00
Very little explosive power or grace.
2
SPEAKER_00
Not cut out to be a diver.
2
SPEAKER_00
I was really fortunate to have a coach who saw more potential in me than I saw in myself and said to me on day one, I will never cut a diver who wants to be here.
2
SPEAKER_00
And I ll put in as much as you want and as much as you put in.
2
SPEAKER_00
And one of the things I really struggled with was knowing when a dive was good and when it was improving.
2
SPEAKER_00
I felt like I needed to always aim for perfect tens.
2
SPEAKER_00
And Eric
3
SPEAKER_00
Yes, my coach one day sat me down and he said, you know, there s no such thing as a perfect 10.
3
SPEAKER_00
Wait, have the Olympic announcers been lying to me?
3
SPEAKER_00
What do you mean?
3
SPEAKER_00
The whole point of a 10 is perfection.
3
SPEAKER_00
That s the appeal of this sport.
3
SPEAKER_00
And he s like, nope, if you look at the rule book, um, a tennis for excellence.
3
SPEAKER_00
So even a dive that gets a quote unquote, perfect score is flawed.
3
SPEAKER_01
Wow.
3
SPEAKER_00
So then what we started doing was we set targets for each dive and he said, okay, you know, basic dive, like a back dive, um, we re going to aim for sixes.
3
SPEAKER_00
And I think that s within your range right now.
3
SPEAKER_00
And then we would level that up over time.
3
SPEAKER_00
As I started to learn harder dives, I remember when I was doing a two and a half somersaults with a full twist.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s like, let s just make the dive.
3
SPEAKER_00
If you don t fail it, if you don t do it for zeros, that ll count.
3
SPEAKER_00
And then, you know, we re aiming for fours.
3
SPEAKER_00
And so we have dive specific goals.
3
SPEAKER_00
What I ve done with that sort of post diving career is realized I never had somebody like this in my life.
3
SPEAKER_00
I need a judge, not just a coach.
3
SPEAKER_00
So what I will do is I ll ask people, give me a zero to 10.
3
SPEAKER_00
How did that go?
3
SPEAKER_00
And it s very rare for people to say 10.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, of course.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_00
So then, you know, whatever they say, whether they give me a three and a half or a six, I just want to know, how can I get closer to 10?
3
SPEAKER_00
That s where I m really trying to use other people s reactions as a mirror.
3
SPEAKER_00
From there, I ll ask for suggestions.
3
SPEAKER_00
But to your point, I need to make sure I m also proud of my own progress and I m focusing on my own principles.
3
SPEAKER_00
And so the last analysis that I do after I get the judges  ratings and the advice from anybody who s willing to coach me is to say, okay, let me go back to the version of me that set this goal in the first place.
3
SPEAKER_00
Would that version of me be proud?
3
SPEAKER_00
And if the answer is no, I don t care what score I got.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_00
How do you navigate this?
3
SPEAKER_01
I d say that I ve definitely got it wrong before as well.
3
SPEAKER_01
Like I ve definitely made mistakes in that where I think when I first started out, I kind of kept things very secret and I kept things very quiet.
3
SPEAKER_01
So I had started working on creating some content online and for everyone who doesn t know, I had been making content offline for 10 years before that, speaking to small groups of 5 to 10 people, colleges, after school clubs, universities, things like that.
3
SPEAKER_01
And my parents forced me to go to public speaking and drama school when I was 11 years old.
3
SPEAKER_01
So I started learning public speaking because I was a shy kid.
3
SPEAKER_01
I have a very similar public speaking story to you when I was 11 years old, so I wasn t
3
SPEAKER_01
born with a skill, it was something that was harnessed and developed.
3
SPEAKER_00
Except for the accent.
3
SPEAKER_01
Except for the accent which I was born with, yes, I can t do anything about that.
3
SPEAKER_01
And funnily enough, and I always like to clarify this, when I see TED speakers with American accents, I prefer it.
3
SPEAKER_00
No.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yes, because to me, hearing from an authority in America, from like, you know, Wharton or Harvard or, you know, it has magic.
3
SPEAKER_00
No, this is like wanting the Beatles to sing with American accents.
3
SPEAKER_00
No, that s different.
3
SPEAKER_00
That s terrible.
3
SPEAKER_00
No, no.
3
SPEAKER_00
British people always sound smarter.
3
SPEAKER_00
We know this.
3
SPEAKER_00
Go on.
3
SPEAKER_00
I feel the opposite way, honestly.
3
SPEAKER_00
Truth.
3
SPEAKER_00
Wow.
3
SPEAKER_01
Truth.
3
SPEAKER_01
My Wife Radhi s cookbook is launching on February 27th.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s called Joyful and will help you cook plant-based dishes effortlessly.
3
SPEAKER_01
I m so excited for her recipes to be in your hands so you can make them in your home for the people you love the most.
3
SPEAKER_01
And it would mean the world to me if you go to JOYFULLBOOK.COM to pre-order now for an exclusive video and a daily wellness guide for free made by Radhi.
3
SPEAKER_01
Again, that s JOYFULLBOOK.COM JOYFULLBOOK.COM and you get your free daily wellness guide made by Radhi.
3
SPEAKER_01
So I developed a skill that I didn t know what I had use for.
3
SPEAKER_01
When I met the monks and studied the Gita and Eastern wisdom, I was like, Oh wow, I have a skill set that was ready to be used for this when I d never used it.
3
SPEAKER_01
I never used public speaking or drama before that for anything meaningful for me at least.
3
SPEAKER_01
And then I d done that for 10 years and then I made my first piece of content online.
3
SPEAKER_01
But I made it in quiet because it s some of these things that you talk about here and I m pointing these out because we can go back to it after I answer your question.
3
SPEAKER_01
I was scared of looking stupid.
3
SPEAKER_01
You talk about making more mistakes theory versus reality in the book.
3
SPEAKER_01
This is page 40.
3
SPEAKER_01
And you talk about looking stupid, feeling shame, being laughed at and experiencing discomfort.
3
SPEAKER_01
I was scared of all of those things because now it was going beyond my community of people, like five to ten people used to come and hear me speak.
3
SPEAKER_01
I had no idea what the online world would bring.
3
SPEAKER_01
I had never done that before.
3
SPEAKER_01
I didn t have any friends who d ever created any online content.
3
SPEAKER_01
So I couldn t check in with someone.
3
SPEAKER_01
I didn t have a coach.
3
SPEAKER_01
So I was kind of doing it in quiet and I think what was beautiful about that is I got to really construct my own voice that was authentic to who I was and was just genuine to who I was.
3
SPEAKER_01
So my earliest videos are half spoken, half spoken word because I loved rap music growing up.
3
SPEAKER_01
So there s you ll hear lazy rhymes, you ll hear words that cascade together and it s inspired by what I loved as a teenager.
3
SPEAKER_01
The visuals were, I ve always been into art and design and so that was very easy for me.
3
SPEAKER_01
I love aesthetics, I love visuals, I love feelings and experiences, so I edited all my own videos.
3
SPEAKER_01
Granted the editing was sloppy because of cuts and sound which I didn t know well, but it was still what was natural to me.
3
SPEAKER_01
And then when I put out my first piece of video, the first people to react were the people I knew and they were all like, Jay you talk too fast, the music s too loud.
3
SPEAKER_01
well we don t think this point is that great and it was all negative feedback and I kept going because I was getting some joy from it so in the beginning it was that way and I think I ve tried to hold on to that as much as possible because as the scale grew the plethora of negativity or criticism or judgment got louder as well and I started to look at it more seriously because now you re worried about perception and image and
3
SPEAKER_01
how you think people view you and whether people see your truth or they don t and you can feel defensive and I think where I ve got to now is I still get affected by it.
3
SPEAKER_01
I m so not beyond getting affected by negative comments or challenging comments or criticisms because
3
SPEAKER_01
my monk training has left me vulnerable at some points because I have created a space in which to always allow advice to come in because that s seen as a mark of wanting to improve and wanting to be better and I ve had to learn to balance that with also knowing my intention.
3
SPEAKER_01
So what I ve accepted is that the only thing I can control is my intention being aligned
3
SPEAKER_01
and pure to what I believe not pure like in a godly way I mean pure in what I believe but the way my action is received will come with advice feedback and criticism and all I can keep doing is keep refining my intention
3
SPEAKER_01
and hope that that will channel the effect of communication externally.
3
SPEAKER_01
And no matter how perfect 10 it is, it will never be perfect.
3
SPEAKER_01
And therefore there will always be criticism, no matter how phenomenal an idea it is or whatever it may be.
3
SPEAKER_01
So that s me meandering around your question to, that s how I m dealing with it.
3
SPEAKER_01
I don t think that s a solution or a solve.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s how I m mentally kind of constructing bridges and walkways to navigate how stressful it is.
3
SPEAKER_00
I think it makes a lot of sense.
3
SPEAKER_00
It also leaves me wondering, like, is there a Jay Shetty rap tour coming?
3
SPEAKER_00
But all kidding aside, although I think there would be an audience for that.
3
SPEAKER_00
I think one of the things that you re making me think about is there s a spectrum of, you know, on one hand we have the monk ideal of either I m open to everything or I m not going to live in fear of social disapproval.
3
SPEAKER_00
Correct.
3
SPEAKER_00
On the other end, I guess we have the monkey reaction, which is like, we are social primates and anything that could lose status could get us excluded.
3
SPEAKER_00
And this is really problematic.
3
SPEAKER_00
I don t think either is really realistic for us as humans.
3
SPEAKER_00
I think we re always going to care about what other people think.
3
SPEAKER_00
And I think my goal is to say I want to care enough about other people s reactions to learn from them, but not so much that I feel pressured to conform to them.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s powerful.
3
SPEAKER_00
Wow.
3
SPEAKER_00
The way that I ve tried to get to that is to say, well, I m always going to be disappointing somebody.
3
SPEAKER_00
So let me decide whose opinions actually matter to me and then include myself in that group and say it s better to let down a bunch of strangers or a bunch of people whose standards are not the same as mine or whose taste doesn t match mine than it is to let down the people I care about and myself too.
3
SPEAKER_01
What you inspired for me also with that conformity idea is how I m willing to be open enough to improve but not see something as a reflection of my identity and I think that s where it s we all struggle where it s like when someone says
3
SPEAKER_01
someone laughs at you you feel like they re laughing at you not at that particular event and moment and day or evening or improv or whatever it was you feel you are someone who should feel shameful as opposed to that was a moment where I made a mistake and I think that s where I think you struggle with
4
SPEAKER_00
when you hear feedback or advice that you start attaching to your identity?
4
SPEAKER_01
I think that s a huge problem.
4
SPEAKER_01
And I think one of the most reassuring bodies of research that I guess speaks to this from the book is the overblown implications effect.
4
SPEAKER_01
The idea that when people see you make a mistake, they don t actually attribute that to your incompetence or your lack of character like you think they do.
4
SPEAKER_01
So, you watch somebody take a really crappy photo and their thumb is in the frame, and you don t immediately think that person is incapable of being a decent photographer.
4
SPEAKER_01
Like, that was a bad photo, right?
4
SPEAKER_01
It was literally a bad snapshot.
4
SPEAKER_01
And it s a snapshot of a bad snapshot.
4
SPEAKER_01
So it s a meta bad snapshot.
4
SPEAKER_01
You know, I think somebody, you know, is trying to cook and they burn whatever s in the oven.
4
SPEAKER_01
You don t immediately think they re a bad cook.
4
SPEAKER_01
You think, oh, they got distracted or they, you know, didn t have the right recipe or this is the first time they re trying that.
4
SPEAKER_01
And I think we re really good at recognizing that in others.
4
SPEAKER_01
We don t sort of leap to conclusions that they re inescapably, hopelessly flawed and that their failing makes them a failure.
4
SPEAKER_01
But I think in our own self-talk and our self-assessment, we do so much of that.
4
SPEAKER_01
Like, I screwed this up.
4
SPEAKER_01
I am a screw up and everyone else is going to know it.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, so true.
4
SPEAKER_00
And it gets really dark.
4
SPEAKER_00
It gets really, really dark.
4
SPEAKER_00
I m so glad we went then.
4
SPEAKER_00
Thank you for asking me to reflect on that too, because I m always trying to find better pathways mentally to deal with these things that you have to navigate on a daily basis.
4
SPEAKER_01
I think we all are.
4
SPEAKER_01
And I don t think you need to thank me for wanting to learn.
4
SPEAKER_00
Well, let s talk about that.
4
SPEAKER_00
I love this diagram that you put in the book about how we think learning happens versus how it actually happens.
4
SPEAKER_00
And I think that idea of, so how we think learning happens, I ll explain that and then you can explain how learning happens from your words.
4
SPEAKER_00
Adam shows in the book this diagram that says knowledge leads to comfort, leads to practice, leads to progress, which is how we think learning happens.
4
SPEAKER_00
And I think so many of our beliefs around learning do come from school and do come from
4
SPEAKER_00
Even for me, learning happens in that I learn something, now I know it fully, and now that rule stands forever.
4
SPEAKER_00
And I think modern day learning isn t that at all.
4
SPEAKER_00
I don t know any rules that have completely stood forever, and apart from obviously certain mathematical or scientific rules, of course.
4
SPEAKER_00
But most rules in business, most rules in marketing, most rules in sales, most rules in even a relationship, they change, they mold,
4
SPEAKER_00
they grow and so I think that fixed approach is hard to shake because you were always told at the end of it well you got the wrong answer so it was always about the answer and it was always about well if you knew the rule you would have got the right answer and today we feel I m not getting the right answer so I must not know the right rule but that we re not finding that so how everyone reflect on that and then guide us through the the principle
4
SPEAKER_01
You re right.
4
SPEAKER_01
We have a kind of had this ideal in our heads that I m going to reach mastery and then I m done.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yes.
4
SPEAKER_01
It s a version of what Tal Ben-Shahar is called the arrival fallacy that, you know, I ll hit my destination and then everything will have changed.
4
SPEAKER_01
And the reality is when you reach mastery, you don t freeze at that moment.
4
SPEAKER_01
You have to keep evolving your knowledge and skills as the world around you evolves.
4
SPEAKER_01
And I think what that leads a lot of people to do is to spend far too much time trying to get to the point of mastery before they ever really try something.
4
SPEAKER_01
You know, from the book, I saw this really clearly in examples of language learners.
4
SPEAKER_01
I mean, how many people do you know that just concluded in high school that they re incapable of mastering a foreign language?
4
SPEAKER_01
You?
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
4
SPEAKER_01
What languages did you take?
4
SPEAKER_00
So we did French and German from year seven, so 11 years old to like 14.
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And if we did well at those, I got to do Russian.
4
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So I actually studied Russian for a year and I could read, write and speak for a whole year.
4
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It was really great learning.
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And then I never got to practice any of those languages.
4
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And so they all fell away.
4
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And then when I went, by the time I went to college, I had already lost touch with all of them.
4
SPEAKER_00
So French, German and Russian were the ones I studied the most.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, and so it sounds like you actually did experience some progress, but then it didn t stick and you weren t able to keep it up.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yes, exactly.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, so I think that s pretty common.
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I think maybe even more common is the, like, I don t have the genes for this.
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I m missing the foreign language gene or I miss my critical window.
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If only I had, you know, if my parents had raised me bilingual or if I had started an immersion when I was four, everything would be different.
4
SPEAKER_01
I met two amazing language learners when I was doing research for the book, Sarah Maria Hasbun and Benny Lewis, and they both concluded after high school that they were incapable of learning a foreign language.
4
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Sarah Maria could not make it through Spanish, and her father speaks fluent Spanish.
4
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Benny, I think, just had a disastrous experience with German, also with Irish,
4
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And what s amazing about the two of them is that combined, they can speak a dozen languages fluently today.
4
SPEAKER_00
Wow.
4
SPEAKER_01
A dozen languages fluently.
4
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Conversationally, even more.
4
SPEAKER_01
So they re polyglots.
4
SPEAKER_01
They re people who not only talk, but think in multiple languages.
4
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They re effectively self-taught, and they ve picked it all up in their 20s, 30s, and beyond.
4
SPEAKER_01
That s incredible.
4
SPEAKER_01
It s amazing.
4
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So what I wanted to know is what can we learn from them, not just about language learning, but about any kind of learning, because they are professional learners.
4
SPEAKER_01
And my biggest takeaway from talking to them and also juxtaposing what they do with the evidence is that language classes are broken in a lot of schools.
4
SPEAKER_01
Because basically what happens is you learn a vocabulary and a bunch of rules of grammar, and then you re taught to more or less just write it down.
4
SPEAKER_01
And very few schools do extensive practice in speaking.
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SPEAKER_01
Which means that you never learn to actually talk in the language, which means you re not using the language and you don t practice enough to really master it.
4
SPEAKER_01
What Sarah Maria and Benny recommend is start speaking from day one.
4
SPEAKER_01
Literally the first day you re picking up a language, you start talking in it.
4
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And what will happen as you do that is you re going to make lots of mistakes.
4
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But through using it, you re going to start to internalize it.
4
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And in fact, one of the things we know from the research is when you make a mistake, you re more likely to remember the correct answer because it really sticks.
4
SPEAKER_01
You re like, oh, wait, I screwed that up last time.
4
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Let me now change it.
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SPEAKER_01
So I think the broader lesson here is that to go all the way back to the diagram, I think a lot of people want to wait to use their knowledge until they ve acquired it.
4
SPEAKER_01
Oh wow.
4
SPEAKER_01
It s not how learning happens.
4
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The way learning happens is you got to use your knowledge as you re acquiring it.
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And that s how you build it.
4
SPEAKER_01
And that s a, that s a virtuous cycle.
4
SPEAKER_00
Oh my God.
4
SPEAKER_00
That, you know, it s so interesting.
4
SPEAKER_00
I don t think I ve ever heard that put that way.
4
SPEAKER_00
I feel like I ve just, and it s resonated so strongly with me because as soon as I met Goranga Das, who s the monk that I spent time with, as soon as I met him, I had no qualification, but I went back to college and started telling everyone about what I d learned.
4
SPEAKER_00
And then I d go back and spend time with him and go learn more and then come back and just teach whatever I d learned.
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And there was no, I didn t have any qualification to teach.
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I didn t, I didn t understand it fully, but it was like, it was so much more fun that way.
4
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And I allowed myself, I gave myself the permission to say, I m just going to teach what I learn.
4
SPEAKER_00
I m going to teach what I learn up until now.
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SPEAKER_00
I don t have to speak beyond my level of realization or reflection, but, but I m learning this.
4
SPEAKER_00
I m fascinated by it.
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SPEAKER_00
Let me share it.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I mean, that s a higher level version of learning by doing.
4
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It s learning by teaching.
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SPEAKER_01
And so often people like to say, well, those who can t do teach.
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SPEAKER_01
And I would edit that and say, no, those who can t do can learn by teaching.
4
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Because exactly as you found, when you explain something to someone else, you remember it better and you also understand it better.
4
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And I actually think anything you want to learn, a lot of people are trying to figure out what is generative AI.
4
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You could go and take a class in it.
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You could go tinker with it.
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I would say go teach a class in it or get a group of people together who are also interested in learning it.
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And each of you take a module to teach the rest of the group.
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And that s when you re really going to internalize it and start to master it.
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SPEAKER_00
yeah i love that i mean i ll butcher it now trying to say as well as you did but yeah because you always hurt for eloquence
4
SPEAKER_00
No, no, but that idea you put so wonderfully.
4
SPEAKER_01
Jay Shetty bad talker is a common, that s actually a meme.
4
SPEAKER_01
I don t know if it s made it on your radar, but like this guy s incoherent.
4
SPEAKER_01
We never understand a word he says.
4
SPEAKER_00
He s just babbling constantly.
4
SPEAKER_00
No, but that particular statement, I love that idea of how we re always waiting till we ve mastered something till the end of something to feel like we can play, share, do.
4
SPEAKER_01
That is well put.
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I m trying to get to the end of the line and then I will have made it and now I can demo it and now I can teach it.
4
SPEAKER_00
Making something public is so horrifying.
4
SPEAKER_00
because the reason why we struggle to go teach a class on AI is because we re scared we re going to be asked questions that we don t know the answer to and actually you re spot on that is exactly the best way to learn because you ll be able to say to all those people hey I don t know but I ll find out for next time or I ll email you the answer whatever it may be and I find that but we haven t created space for
5
SPEAKER_00
it to be okay to not know.
5
SPEAKER_03
No, I think that s right.
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SPEAKER_03
And there s actually some work on this in psychology, which shows that when an expert expresses uncertainty, they actually end up becoming more believable, in part because people are surprised, and then they listen more carefully and realize, wow, this person does know what they re talking about.
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SPEAKER_03
I don t think that permission should only be granted to experts.
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SPEAKER_03
Correct.
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SPEAKER_03
I think, in fact, the less you know, the quicker you should be to say, I have no idea.
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SPEAKER_03
And it s really ironic that only the people who know the most often get to the point of feeling secure in that knowledge to be able to say, yeah, I have no clue, but let me let me do some research on that and come back to you.
5
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
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SPEAKER_03
And I, I mean, I felt this as a teacher, I felt like, especially in the, you know, the major public speaking anxiety days, early career, I felt like I had to be able to regurgitate a study for every single question that came up.
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SPEAKER_03
I can imagine.
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Yeah.
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Like I thought that was my job and I was really missing out on the joy that, that students get.
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And also that I get of saying, I ve never seen anyone explore that before.
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SPEAKER_03
I think that would make a great dissertation.
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SPEAKER_03
Have you ever thought about coming to a PhD program?
5
SPEAKER_03
Totally.
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SPEAKER_03
And I don t know, I think part of the joy of learning is that every answer raises at least nine new questions.
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SPEAKER_03
Yeah.
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And I think that we close that off when we expect people to always have an answer.
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
5
SPEAKER_00
You ve mentioned a few times that, and even in your diving example, the need for a coach.
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SPEAKER_00
You know, I feel like therapy culture has, and is still slowly penetrating.
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SPEAKER_00
Like we, I think if you re in the circle, you think of it as like really accessible and easy and it s a big deal.
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SPEAKER_03
And not stigmatized.
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SPEAKER_00
Correct and the truth is it isn t across the board, it s getting there, it s slowly becoming destigmatized.
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SPEAKER_00
I think the idea of finding a coach is so, unless you re an athlete, it seems so far as an idea or as a thought process of how you approach things.
5
SPEAKER_00
I know there are executive coaches that have definitely kind of got into the zeitgeist but still finding a coach is quite an alien
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SPEAKER_00
approach I find that people have, there s stigma there, there s confusion there, there s a lack of understanding of what is a coach.
5
SPEAKER_00
How have you thought about it, seeing as you ve mentioned it a bunch of times in the book and today?
5
SPEAKER_03
Well, I think we re actually comfortable with it in certain domains, right?
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SPEAKER_03
So no one would ever hesitate to say, all right, I want my kid to learn the piano.
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They need a piano teacher.
5
SPEAKER_03
So I think when it comes to hobbies and skills early in life, everybody knows they need a coach to learn the basics and then move toward intermediate and then hopefully figure out if this is something they want to pursue further.
5
SPEAKER_03
I think where it starts to become a little uncomfortable is when you re an adult and you think that you should be able to teach yourself everything or you want to be self-reliant, not dependent on someone else.
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SPEAKER_03
And I think that s, that s a broken mental model of a coach.
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SPEAKER_03
Um, a coach is actually, I think a good coach is trying to work him or herself out of a job and say, obviously I m going to give you lots of advice and I m going to try to help you improve.
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SPEAKER_03
But at some point you should internalize the way that I look at your performance, the way that I think about helping you make progress to the degree that you can, you can figure out what would I say like after this and then apply that advice.
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SPEAKER_03
And at that point you re probably ready for a new coach who has different knowledge and skills to share with you.
5
SPEAKER_03
And I think,
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That s where I would start is I would say coaches are all around us.
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Going back to the asking for advice idea, you ask people for advice, you start to turn them into your coaches.
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SPEAKER_03
And there s no reason why you can t formalize this.
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SPEAKER_03
A lot of, and you re familiar with this, a lot of writers have writing groups where somebody is working on a manuscript and then four or five other writers are basically coaching them and trying to help them improve it.
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SPEAKER_03
I don t think that should be limited to, you know, it has to be my job or it has to be the hobby I m trying to improve at.
5
SPEAKER_03
I think anything you want to get better at, you could just ask for somebody to give you informal coaching and then you learn really quickly, is this person s perspective helpful to me in this domain?
5
SPEAKER_00
Absolutely, absolutely.
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SPEAKER_00
Do you have a coach?
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SPEAKER_00
I m looking for one right now, funnily enough, that s why I asked you.
5
SPEAKER_00
On what?
5
SPEAKER_03
Now we know why you were asking, how do I figure out what to grow on?
5
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, exactly.
5
SPEAKER_00
And I think there s that feeling for me about, I d say if I really worded it accurately and clearly, it would be
5
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I m reintegrating and re renewing and refining my values because my life has changed so drastically and so there were times when I felt like
5
SPEAKER_00
I had kept up with the pace of my external growth and then all of a sudden I was like oh no this is way bigger than I thought it was and this is so different from how I lived just 10 to 15 years ago and I want to realign and reconnect with that if that makes sense.
5
SPEAKER_00
It does.
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And so I think that is something which I ve given myself personal time to do regularly
5
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to refine, to realign, to reconnect, but to do it with someone else who can see beyond and maybe has had experience of two very opposite worlds and has traversed those paths may be really helpful.
5
SPEAKER_00
And so I think that s what I would be looking for.
5
SPEAKER_00
And so coaching would be the right modality for that.
5
SPEAKER_02
When the Taliban banned music in Afghanistan, millions were plunged into silence.
5
SPEAKER_02
Radios were smashed.
5
SPEAKER_02
Cassettes burned.
5
SPEAKER_02
You could be beaten or jailed or killed for breaking the rules.
5
SPEAKER_02
And yet, Afghans did it anyway.
5
SPEAKER_02
This is the story of how a group of people brought music back to Afghanistan by creating their own version of American Idol.
5
SPEAKER_02
The danger they endured.
5
SPEAKER_05
They said my head should be cut off.
5
SPEAKER_02
the joy they brought to the nation.
5
SPEAKER_01
You re free completely.
5
SPEAKER_01
No one is there to destroy you.
5
SPEAKER_02
I m John Legend.
5
SPEAKER_02
Listen to Afghan Star on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
5
SPEAKER_01
Hey everyone, this is Molly and Matt and we re the hosts of Grown Up Stuff How to Adult, a podcast from Ruby Studio and iHeart Podcasts.
5
SPEAKER_04
It s a show dedicated to helping you figure out the trickiest parts of adulting.
5
SPEAKER_01
Like how to start planning for retirement, creating a healthy skincare routine, understanding when and how much to tip someone, and so much more.
5
SPEAKER_04
We re back with season two of the podcast, which means more opportunities to glow up and become a more responsible and better adult, one life lesson at a time.
5
SPEAKER_01
And let me just tell you, this show is just as much for us as it is for you.
5
SPEAKER_01
So let s figure this stuff out together.
5
SPEAKER_01
This season, we re going to talk about whether or not we re financially and emotionally ready for dog ownership.
5
SPEAKER_04
We re going to figure out the benefits of a high yield savings account.
5
SPEAKER_01
And what exactly are the duties of being a member of the wedding party?
5
SPEAKER_04
All that plus so much more.
5
SPEAKER_01
Let s learn about all of it and then some.
5
SPEAKER_01
Listen to Grown Up Stuff How to Adult on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
5
SPEAKER_06
Guess what, Bango?
5
SPEAKER_06
What s up, Will?
5
SPEAKER_06
So iHeart is giving us a whole minute to promote our podcast, Part-Time Genius.
5
SPEAKER_05
I know, that s why I spent my whole week composing a haiku for the occasion.
5
SPEAKER_05
It s about my emotional journey in podcasting over the last seven years, and it s called Earthquake House.
5
SPEAKER_06
Mango, I m going to cut you off right there.
5
SPEAKER_05
Why don t we just tell people about our show instead?
5
SPEAKER_05
Yeah, that s a better idea.
5
SPEAKER_05
So every week on Part-Time Genius, we feed our curiosity by answering the world s most important questions.
5
SPEAKER_05
Things like, when did America start dialing 911?
5
SPEAKER_05
Is William Shatner s best acting work in Esperanto?
5
SPEAKER_05
Also, what happened to Esperanto?
5
SPEAKER_06
Plus, we cover questions like how Chinese is your Chinese food?
5
SPEAKER_06
How do dollar stores stay in business?
5
SPEAKER_06
And of course, is there an Illuminati of cheese?
5
SPEAKER_05
There absolutely is.
5
SPEAKER_05
And we are risking our lives by talking about it.
5
SPEAKER_05
But if you love mind-blowing facts, incredible history and really bad jokes, make your brains happy and tune in to Part-Time Genius.
5
SPEAKER_06
Listen to Part-Time Genius on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.
5
SPEAKER_03
I think it could be.
5
SPEAKER_03
I think it s interesting.
5
SPEAKER_03
There are two levels of that that I think could be fruitful.
5
SPEAKER_03
The first one is exactly the way you framed it, which is let me take a step back and figure out what my values are and how my core principles in life have changed, should change moving forward.
5
SPEAKER_00
That s what it is, yeah.
5
SPEAKER_03
But I think the other layer of it is saying maybe the values are the same, but your opportunity set has evolved.
5
SPEAKER_03
So what does it mean to live your values now, given those opportunities?
5
SPEAKER_00
Correct.
5
SPEAKER_00
Absolutely.
5
SPEAKER_00
Absolutely.
5
SPEAKER_00
There we go.
5
SPEAKER_03
I ve got a few candidates for you.
5
SPEAKER_03
I ll suggest them offline.
5
SPEAKER_00
Please.
5
SPEAKER_00
I genuinely love that.
5
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I know.
5
SPEAKER_00
And that s definitely been where my head s been at probably the most, most recently.
5
SPEAKER_00
Again, I usually sit with something like this and let it simmer and let it clarify and it s nice in a forum like this to be able to vocalize it in an articulate way and that s another beautiful thing about talking to someone else about it.
5
SPEAKER_00
If you keep going around it in your own head, chances are you won t say it as articulately as you would say to someone else because you want it to make sense to them.
5
SPEAKER_03
That s one of my favorite things about conversation.
5
SPEAKER_03
There was a biographer once, it was E.M.
5
SPEAKER_03
Forster s biographer.
5
SPEAKER_03
She used this beautiful phrase called inverse charisma, which was the idea, she said Forster had this ability
6
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to ask you such insightful questions with such sincere interest that he brought out a more insightful, more charming version of yourself than existed.
6
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I m like, that s part of what a good coach is.
6
SPEAKER_02
I actually think great coaches are filled with inverse charisma.
6
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They re not giving the rousing halftime speech all the time or the pep talk.
6
SPEAKER_02
They re not always necessarily kicking you in the butt to try to get you to work harder or persist longer.
6
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I think what they re doing is posing challenges and ideas for you that bring out a better version of you.
6
SPEAKER_00
Yes, yes I couldn t agree more and I think that is what hidden potential is.
6
SPEAKER_00
I mean it s someone is not planting potential, it s not manufactured potential, it s not inception potential, it s hidden potential, it s there and someone s helping ask the question so you can keep revealing and peeling away the layers.
6
SPEAKER_00
And I think that is exactly what a good coach does.
6
SPEAKER_00
A good coach is not telling you who you are or telling you the answer or telling you who you could be.
6
SPEAKER_00
It s allowing you to discover that for yourself which is needed for someone else to do that because otherwise you re just stuck in your head saying I m not that.
6
SPEAKER_00
I remember I had a coach years ago when I d left the monastery I was working at Accenture in London and he d always say to me you re an entrepreneur.
6
SPEAKER_00
Just from watching you I can observe that you re an entrepreneur.
6
SPEAKER_00
And I d be like, no, I m not an entrepreneur.
6
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I don t want to be an entrepreneur.
6
SPEAKER_00
And I said, I would fight and debate that with him.
6
SPEAKER_00
I would give him all the reasons.
6
SPEAKER_00
And he said, Jay, one day you ll see.
6
SPEAKER_00
And now I look back and I think, wow, I was, that is exactly who I was, not in the way that it may be seen in the world, but the autonomy, the wanting of being artistic, being a leader, wanting to create, wanting to produce without, with freedom and without restraint, like all of that quality of an entrepreneur.
6
SPEAKER_00
I think language is so limiting too.
6
SPEAKER_02
It is.
6
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
6
SPEAKER_00
Right.
6
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
6
SPEAKER_02
You re right.
6
SPEAKER_02
If you would, if you had defined entrepreneurship back then as, as being someone who sees opportunities and then creates a vision and then builds around that without giving up a ton of freedom, like, yeah, of course that s who I am.
6
SPEAKER_02
And instead you re like, I gotta be, I don t want to run a startup.
6
SPEAKER_00
Like that s, that s really my head.
6
SPEAKER_01
I was like, I don t want to manage people.
6
SPEAKER_01
Like I don t, yeah.
6
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I got to be pitching a scrub daddy on Shark Tank.
6
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I don t want to start a business.
6
SPEAKER_00
That s not what I want to do with my life.
6
SPEAKER_00
And so, yeah, it s fascinating how language limits us.
6
SPEAKER_00
And I was going to ask you about that.
6
SPEAKER_00
How do you feel comfortable, and this is chapter three of your book, The Imperfectionists, finding the sweet spot between flawed and flawless.
6
SPEAKER_00
How do you allow yourself to release anything when you know it s going to be flawed and imperfect?
6
SPEAKER_00
Because I think that that s the challenge, right?
6
SPEAKER_00
With the book especially, with social media less so, it s short form and short term, so there s, it s easier to get to what you want to get to.
6
SPEAKER_00
But with a book, with a talk, with a, obviously as a professor, I mean everything you re teaching, you know, people are going to practice it for years potentially,
6
SPEAKER_00
How do you feel comfortable putting something out that s imperfect and incomplete?
6
SPEAKER_02
This is a little embarrassing, but I have to say, so I, after writing the book, I said, all right, I want to, I want to use some of the psychometric tools that we were trained in to create a fun quiz for people to identify what their greatest character strength is among those, and then also an area for growth.
6
SPEAKER_02
So I finished the quiz, I sent it out to a bunch of people to pilot it, and then it was time for me to take it.
6
SPEAKER_02
And after writing this whole chapter about what I ve learned about being an imperfectionist, my lowest score was imperfectionism.
6
SPEAKER_02
So I am not fully recovered from perfectionism and it s sometimes hard for me to release things.
6
SPEAKER_02
I think what s helped me is a couple of things.
6
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One, the calibration of saying, okay, if it s something as big as a book, I mean, I m aiming for a nine.
6
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Like this, I m going to pour a lot of time into it.
6
SPEAKER_02
Hopefully a lot of people are going to engage with it.
6
SPEAKER_02
And so I really want it to be as good as I m capable of doing at that moment in my life.
6
SPEAKER_02
If it s a social media post, like I m content with a six and some people might get angry at me.
6
SPEAKER_02
Some people might misunderstand me.
6
SPEAKER_02
I m definitely going to learn something.
6
SPEAKER_02
And it s better to put out a bunch of potential sixes and hit some eights than to post once a year as somebody who cares a lot about both sharing knowledge and learning from other people s reactions to those, you know, those posts.
6
SPEAKER_02
I think that s been really helpful.
6
SPEAKER_02
And I guess what I ve realized through that is if you never put anything out into the world, then you re actually limiting your contribution.
6
SPEAKER_02
And I think when psychologists study regret, it s pretty clear that in the short run, people are afraid of failing, but in the long run, they re more afraid of failing to try.
6
SPEAKER_02
And that s kind of where I ve come down, is I d rather fail than fail to try at all.
6
SPEAKER_00
It s really fascinating, you said something there which which I really resonate with is this idea that part of the learning is in the sharing and seeing reactions and I think we underestimate like I could honestly sit down and think I know everything about a subject and keep quizzing myself and think I know everything but the moment I share it with someone else and they ask a question I ll be like oh I should have been you know that that was missing I didn t think of that and so sharing it in some form
6
SPEAKER_00
even if it s not the complete form, but sharing a talk based on one of the chapters or sharing, I often do that with podcasts.
6
SPEAKER_00
Like when I have an idea, I m like, let me just record a podcast episode about that and see what people have to think about it.
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And it s a great way of just experimenting and testing and seeing what part of it I didn t consider.
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Because someone will consider it.
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And we don t see that as part of the growth process.
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We see it as separate.
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We see it as, I m going to make something complete.
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People are going to have exactly the reaction I want to it.
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And that will be the success of it.
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Yeah, I think that s right.
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I think the medium also matters.
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So podcasting is a much more forgiving medium, I think, than book writing.
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A hundred percent.
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Because nobody expects you to have said everything exactly right in the moment.
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Whereas a book, you say something wrong in a book.
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It s like, well, shouldn t you have done your research?
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Why didn t you fact check that?
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One of the things I see a lot of people hold back on when it comes to sharing anything they ve created is so many people limit themselves by saying, I don t want to self-promote.
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I m so glad we re going here.
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Let s go there.
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This is not about me.
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I m like, good.
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Because there s a huge difference between self-promotion and idea promotion.
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Promoting yourself is saying, look at me, look at how great I am.
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I m special.
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You re sharing the awards you ve won.
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You re posting a lot of selfies.
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You re in the spotlight.
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I think idea promotion is really different, which is to say, I made something I m proud of.
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I hope it s valuable to you.
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I hope you get some joy out of it.
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If you don t put that out in the world, you re depriving people of benefiting from what you poured your heart into.
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And that to me seems like a mistake.
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Yeah, did you always feel like that was something you had to wrap your head around?
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Because that s something I definitely had to wrap my head around.
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So I m intrigued.
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As a professor, I just don t imagine putting a book out and promoting it.
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Like that doesn t come naturally.
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Not at all.
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No, I remember a few weeks after I got tenure, a colleague wrote and said, hey, I m thinking about writing a book about motivation.
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You ve done a lot of research in this area.
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Do you want to co-author it?
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I loved working with this collaborator, huge admirer of his work.
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This is a great honor.
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And I ve always wanted to figure out if there s a way I could share my ideas more broadly than just with the students I happened to meet in the classroom.
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I immediately, I had a lab meeting later that day with a group of undergraduates and I told them I was gonna do this and they had a mutiny.
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Like, no, you cannot.
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You cannot write a book about somebody else s ideas.
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You need to write your own book.
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Nope, can t do it.
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I cannot do that.
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I don t feel comfortable doing it.
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I hardly even teach my own research in the classroom.
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I want to share with you the knowledge that I ve found most useful.
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I don t think my research is the most important thing for me to teach you.
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And they pushed back really hard and they said, look, you have a responsibility if you ve invested a lot of your own time and energy in the work that you do to share that more broadly and get it out there and see what people think of it.
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And they basically held me hostage.
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They said, you re not leaving this lab meeting until you agree you will write your own book before you help somebody else do theirs.
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And eventually the logic bullied me into
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into agreeing.
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And I kind of came around and said, OK, this is what we do.
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We don t create knowledge for it to collect dust in academic journals or for it to only be available to students who are lucky enough to get into an Ivy League school.
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That s not right.
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I believe in democratizing knowledge.
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So, yeah, I m going to do this.
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Book came out a little bit beforehand.
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I sent an email to my network just saying, hey, you know, I wrote this book.
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If you find it interesting or useful, would be really grateful if you would help spread the word.
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The responses were so lovely, but I got one email that kind of crushed me in the moment.
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And it was from an academic colleague who said, Dear Adam, love the book, hate the self-promotion.
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This was my fear.
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And I thought about it and I ruminated about it.
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And then it hit me.
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This is not self-promotion, it s idea promotion.
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This is about the knowledge contained in the book.
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I went out of my way to cite a bunch of, you know, a long list of researchers.
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Later I was told too many.
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synthesize a body of knowledge and get it out there.
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And we have to be, to a certain degree, in the spotlight in order to promote our work.
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And I think people want to connect to the author, the narrator.
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And so there s, I think, an amount of self-disclosure that s required.
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But self-promotion, that does not have to happen.
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And I looked at the book and I said, OK, the main things I ve shared about myself are mistakes I made, times I failed, and what I learned from those.
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So I feel OK saying this was idea promotion, not self-promotion.
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And that s, for me, the litmus test ever since.
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So I guess that s how I landed at that distinction.
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It s such an interesting thing for any artist, any creative, any academic, any person who feels that they ve come across something worth sharing.
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And that s why I ve always been a fan of anyone who has anything worth sharing, because there are so many, I think,
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Isn t Ted s, what s Ted s tagline at one point?
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Ideas worth spreading.
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Ideas worth spreading.
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I like sharing better.
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I don t want to assume that every idea should be spread, but share it with someone and let s find out.
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Yeah, sharing.
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And I think we all have ideas worth sharing.
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We have insights worth sharing of some kind.
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And especially if you re an artist, creator, academic.
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and I think for me it was it was very very similar journey to yours and it s so interesting to hear that academic circles and spiritual circles can often have the same habits of behavior and for me when I wrote Think Like a Monk which was my first book
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the biggest thing I was trying to do and what I learned in my second book which if I would have known in my first book I would have done this is kind of explain this thought process where I tried to do it intuitively in how I shared it as opposed to explicitly spelled it out whereas now I m much better at explicitly spelling out what I m doing.
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I did that to honor all monk traditions.
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So I studied lots of different monk traditions, I spoke to lots of different monks and so it wasn t just the tradition I studied in.
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So that was very important to me because I believed that there were traditions beyond mine that would have values to share and important messages to share.
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The other thing that I tried to do in the book was I definitely have always wanted to make ancient wisdom accessible, practical and relevant.
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That has always been my mission because I m trying to speak to the 18 year old kid that I was in London
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Before I got into spirituality and meditation and mindfulness, I m not trying to speak to the person I am now or someone who s already learned a ton.
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And so to me to make it simple and accessible and relevant was my biggest call and always has been.
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And that can often come with the critique of you re watering it down, you re oversimplifying it, this isn t the truth in the way it should be shared.
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And the other thing was, similar to you, and I love that you said that too, I never shared an enlightened experience in the book.
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All the experiences are mistakes, they re when meditation went wrong, they re me being envious, they re me judging people, they re me wanting to get what the monks have without having done the work.
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All the stories are the human experience of a kid from London who doesn t have the qualification to be where he is in this space, trying to make sense of it.
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And so the book was it wasn t think like me like that was in the book it was called think like a monk like I m not a monk anymore and I want to show us how we can think like monks but not live like monks and I think it was really interesting to me just our again it comes from our preconceived notions on ideas language having baggage and thoughts where
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People were just like oh but you re not a monk anymore so how do you teach that and this isn t your life and it was so interesting to me that we couldn t learn from things that were things I d learned and gained as opposed to if you re not exactly that thing anymore then you can t teach it.
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I think there are things you could study that you don t have to share.
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If you were just really fascinated by painting or rare coins, you could say this is a personal interest of mine.
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And it s just, it s my own curiosity.
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I think you and choosing to be a monk, me and choosing to be a psychologist,
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we chose to take a deep dive into the mind and human behavior.
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If we gain knowledge from that, it feels like it s selfish not to share it.
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Like, why would you keep that to yourself?
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Why should the wisdom of monks only be accessible to monks?
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Absolutely.
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It doesn t seem right.
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Yeah, it doesn t seem right at all.
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It feels like taking away.
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It feels selfish and also to honor those people.
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To me, the book was honoring these amazing people that have done it for their whole lives and studies of people who ve meditated for 40 years and
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you know that s not me and and I just find it interesting that yeah it s fascinating and there s a great book by Austin Kleon called show your work yes and I really like it and I recommend that to anyone who s struggling with showing their work because it s exactly and I love the way you ve differentiated in self-promotion and idea promotion and I really hope that that
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stays with people who are listening and watching because if you have an idea that you believe is worth sharing and worth helping people and supporting people, please don t hold on to it.
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Please don t hide it from the world because I worry for us to only be exposed to the same three ideas that everyone s exposed to because we hide away from all these other new ones.
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Sometimes I hear people hold back for another reason, which is they re afraid somebody is going to steal their idea.
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And Austin Kleon wrote about this in Steal Like an Artist, another book of his that I found very thought provoking.
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My response to that is, you know what, it is possible that somebody will steal your idea.
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Most of the time that won t be intentional.
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But what psychologists have sometimes called kleptomnesia,
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where you misremember an idea as your own and forget the source, that can happen inadvertently.
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You hear an idea, you know, you don t necessarily track where you learned it.
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And then, you know, it kind of bubbles up a month later and you think you thought of it.
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I think that can happen.
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Ideas can get stolen unpurposed.
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They can get stolen by accident.
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What I always want to say to people who are afraid of their ideas getting stolen is,
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If you have one big idea and you re afraid of putting it out there because you think someone else is going to steal it, you don t have a lot of ideas.
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And people who generally succeed with ideas are people who are constantly generating ideas.
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And so what you should do is you should generate a whole portfolio of ideas.
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And then you re not identified with any one of them.
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You don t feel attached to just one of them.
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And then the risk goes way down.
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Yeah, there s so many blocks that we could talk about.
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One s the ego, right?
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So the self-promotion is almost like an inverse ego.
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So it s almost like we think we re better because we re not promoting an idea.
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That is ironic.
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Yeah right like it s like I think I m better because I m not monetizing or democratizing or popularizing and publicizing yes yeah popularizing or publicizing an idea makes it better to not do that.
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You talk about the ego differently but let s talk about in that category first of all.
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It s interesting how that s seen as a holier-than-thou kind of approach and I don t think either is holier.
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I just think that one s compassionate and to me that s more what it is.
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I think when someone shares an idea about an experience that I could never have, to me that s just compassion.
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It s their compassion to share with me.
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I mean, there s no reason why people can t have multiple motives behind their behavior.
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I mean, almost always do.
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I think it s very rare that people are conscious of all their motives or willing to admit to all of them.
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But I actually think the most sustainable route to unlocking people s hidden potential is to try to align their personal aspirations with social good.
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And I don t think there s anything wrong with saying, yeah, I want to promote this idea both because I want it to help other people and because I appreciate people respecting my knowledge and considering me a credible source.
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I actually think it would be problematic if you re like, yep.
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I care nothing about my own reputation whatsoever.
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Like only character matters to me.
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And even if people think I m an idiot and I m dishonest and I lack integrity, like as long as I know I m a good person, that s good.
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Like that s just not functional in the social world.
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And so I think we should give people, this is another, we need to give people the space to say, yes, like I do, I do want to be valued and appreciated for things that I think are important.
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And I want to add value to other people too.
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Oh, I m so glad you went there.
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Yeah, it s so important.
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It s so important to allow ourselves that too.
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Like, yeah, do I like it when someone leaves me a nice review on the podcast or the book?
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Of course I do.
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Yeah, I love it.
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It feels great.
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And do I do things because they make me feel good?
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Yes, I do.
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Sure.
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And at the same time, it comes from a place of wanting to do good in the world and wanting to spread ideas that will help people and serve people and support people and
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hopefully help them transform their own lives.
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And it comes from both of those places.
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I want to do things that make me feel good and do good in the world.
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I don t know any other way, actually.
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I don t either.
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And I don t know how to live in a world, if I only tried to do good to others, I would automatically feel good from that anyway.
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But if I was only to do things that were only good for me, I don t think I d be satisfied either.
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No, I mean, you d lack the purpose that so much of your work concentrates on.
8
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song.
8
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A new season of Bridgerton is here.
8
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And with it, a new season of Bridgerton, the official podcast.
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I m your host, Gabrielle Collins.
8
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And this season, we are bringing fans even deeper into the ton.
8
SPEAKER_01
Colin Bridgerton has returned from his travels abroad.
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SPEAKER_01
Is Betrothal written in the stars for the eligible bachelor?
8
SPEAKER_01
Meanwhile, the ton is reverberating with speculation of who holds Lady Whistledown s pen.
8
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We re discussing it all.
8
SPEAKER_01
I sit down with Nicola Coughlin, Luke Newton, Shonda Rhimes, and more to offer an exclusive peek behind the scenes of each episode of the new season.
8
SPEAKER_01
Watch season three of the Shondaland series on Netflix.
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Then, fall in love all over again by listening to Bridgerton, the official podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
8
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Subscribe to catch a new episode every Thursday.
8
SPEAKER_00
What was the thing you found most surprising when writing Hidden Potential about Hidden Potential specifically that kind of you were like oh wow I didn t I never thought I d find this?
8
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I think the first one was the idea that learning character skills can be more powerful than learning cognitive skills.
8
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Assuming that you have a foundation in thinking skills, that learning to embrace discomfort and become more of a sponge and accept the right imperfections, that that could fuel more growth than if you re an entrepreneur, learning finance and marketing, stunning.
8
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and that you can learn those skills in your 40s and 50s, as opposed to thinking that those character skills are set when you re young.
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That I found liberating and encouraging.
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So that was a surprise.
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I think that maybe a bigger surprise though, just as I think through the insights that I picked up as I was investigating.
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I think I had this image of people who, you know, not just achieve greater things, but achieve the greatest things.
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I had this image that they just figured out how to make
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the daily grind just tolerable.
8
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I think about Steph Curry just drilling over and over again to shoot as well as he does.
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I assumed that he just figured out how to not mind the monotony and the boredom and the exhaustion.
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And he would just power through it.
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And he had a superhuman ability to tolerate extreme amounts of discomfort.
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Lightbulb, while reading the research on deliberate practice was like,
8
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is not that motivating for a lot of people to just do the same activity repetitively over and over again.
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If you re Steph Curry, shooting is fun, like doing wind sprints and then trying to make baskets when you can hardly breathe and doing that over and over again, like not anybody s, like not my idea of joy.
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And I don t think it s Steph s either.
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And through the research I read and through spending time with his trainer who designed this set of routines that had really elevated his game,
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I realized that deliberate play is a huge part of practice.
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And we don t give it enough credit that, you know, if you re Steph, you play a game to see how many baskets you can make in a minute and a half.
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And then you ve got a target to shoot for and you re competing against yourself or you re competing against a clock.
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And all of a sudden that that supercharges your motivation, especially in the summer when nobody s, you know, when you re not actually playing basketball games that really count.
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And I looked at that and thought, why do we have to turn the daily grind into such a grind?
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Like, yes, there are times when we all have to push ourselves, but pushing yourself day after day is not a sustainable routine.
8
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And what we want to do is try to figure out how to redesign practice and skill development so that you could break skills down into these enjoyable pieces and then make them more playful.
8
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You mentioned Dan Coyle.
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I love the culture code.
8
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And one of my favorite ideas that he wrote about was the difference between shallow fun and deep fun.
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I think shallow fun is gamification.
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It s tricking people into enjoying practice, even though they don t really like it because there s a carrot that s being dangled at the end.
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I think the deep fun is about saying we want to actually take the process of learning itself and make it enjoyable.
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And so, you know, the Steph example is a great one, but it s easy to think about that in basketball.
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Evelyn Glennie, a percussionist, saying, like, let me figure out if I could harmonize Bach on a snare drum.
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Like, what a cool way to make learning percussion playful.
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And I think that was a big aha for me.
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I think that I had come to see play as a reward for finishing my to-do list and mastering a skill.
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And now I realize it s got to be on the to-do list and it s got to be part of learning a skill.
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That resonates so strongly as well.
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Again, it s like, yeah, the process has to be fun, meaningful and fulfilling in and of itself, not just the reward.
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Trying to think about an activity that I ve done that with that just felt impossible to do it with.
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Have you, have you, what was, what was the thought experiment that you did there?
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I was wondering this, this had to, I feel like monks are often misunderstood as like complete denial of any earthly joy.
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And I, I don t, I don t see how a human could ever function in that environment.
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So I guess the question is you had to do a lot of hard stuff as, as a monk, especially I imagine in training, like how did you make that playful?
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You made it playful by laughing at yourself.
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The thing that came to mind was often we d walk down a path and we d be asked to find a new stone and the goal was to find something and be really present with it and be aware of it, its colors, its texture, its shape, everything you d want to practice through a mindfulness practice and what the mind would do
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is I d find a stone for today and I d find a stone for tomorrow so that I didn t have to do the same activity tomorrow because we want to make things easier mentally and we re always trying to cheat the system or you know break the game.
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So my mind would do that very naturally.
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I d find two stones, alright saw that one where that is behind that tree, today I ll pick this one, tomorrow I found one anyway.
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And then we d get to the next day and the teacher would say, all right, today we re trying to find a petal.
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And they d just switch it up on you.
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And you d laugh at your own mind, like you d find it hilarious that your mind was trying to game the system, but the monks were too, you know.
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They already were one step ahead of you.
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They already know that.
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The cheat codes are already built in.
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Exactly.
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And so I think things like that where
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learning to laugh at yourself brought play.
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When you saw the monkey mind, as you mentioned earlier, you laughed at it, you didn t, you weren t harsh on yourself, you didn t, if you saw a monkey, and I ve seen monkeys do this in India, steal people s sunglasses, cut bags if you re holding it to grab fruit.
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Diet Coke.
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Yeah, Diet Coke, whatever.
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And then they chug it before you can get it back.
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Yeah, chug it, yeah.
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Stealing, I ve seen them steal credit cards, like, out of people s hands if they re paying for something.
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You don t look at it and go,
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what an idiot like what s wrong with you just think oh monkeys and you just laugh and and that s partly what the mind is like like it s it s funny to watch the flawed mind uh and not take it so seriously and recognize that it s just how it s built and how it s how it acts
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I like that a lot.
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Yeah.
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That s what came to mind.
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Yeah.
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I mean, I think the idea of, you know, of taking your goals and your growth seriously, but not your self and your ego that seriously is obviously powerful there.
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It also sounds like your teachers really appreciated the importance of novelty and variety.
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Absolutely.
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And saying, all right, we got to switch up stones for pedals just to keep making this interesting and make sure you don t lose your curiosity.
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Yeah, and just recognizing that you were going to, you know, I remember saying to one of my teachers once, I was like, I was like, Oh, you know, I m just really struggling with my ego.
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I don t think it s ever going to go away.
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It s so big.
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It s so hard to deal with.
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I see it come up in so many scenarios and they just be like, relax, just, you know, it s okay.
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Like your ego will always be there.
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Just do your service.
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Like it wasn t seen with as much like,
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kind of pain and stress because they understood it s hard they get that like they know what the mind is going to do and so why would they react to it with this like very serious and kind of imprisoned undertone rather than like yeah it s going to be there just do it anyway i i like that idea of just just do it anyway it s going to be there do it anyway like okay so you might feel you have too much of an ego to give a give a talk
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Do it anyway and be aware of it, right?
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Be aware of something and do it anyway is far better than wait till you overcome your ego to do something.
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Like that, you ll be waiting for the rest of your life.
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It will never disappear.
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And that s just ego.
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It could be anything, obviously, like envy or any of the things you mentioned.
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I don t know that it s realistic to expect it to disappear altogether.
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I think what you want is for it to be, you want it to be in the rear view mirror.
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So that it s not your primary focus, but you re checking in on it every once in a while.
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Exactly.
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Adam, there are so many things in Hidden Potential.
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We could talk for hours and hours, and I want people to actually read the book.
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I want people to pick it up.
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I want you to go and grab a copy of Hidden Potential, The Science of Achieving Greater Things, as we ve talked about today.
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There s such a need for progress.
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There s such a need for growth.
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I think this book
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breaks it down, makes it simple in a way that I love and I admire.
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But on top of all of that, it s packed with great stories, case studies, science and research to back it all up.
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And in Adam s signature style of making it fun, the natural humor that always comes through.
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But thank you for doing this.
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And I wanted to ask you, Adam, is there anything you haven t shared, either from the book or that s come in your mind and heart that you re like, yeah, I really want people to know this or share this.
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And they may not be, but I want to give you the floor.
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You re, as always, too kind.
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No, I mean, the only thing is I m second guessing, like, was that the most surprising thing?
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Should there have been a more surprising thing?
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I am right now failing my imperfectionist test.
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It doesn t matter which one I picked because no one knows what the alternatives were, but I am curious.
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So we talked about deliberate play being, you know, potentially as important or more important than deliberate practice for growth.
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The other two that I was just starting to think about were that when you get stuck, you often have to move back to move forward.
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That before people leap in a skill, they have to dip.
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That was an aha that I did not have before.
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Yeah, that it s better.
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You were talking about climbing the mountain.
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The idea of like, yeah, that it s better if you re stuck, not just to stand there, but to walk backwards to kind of.
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And find a new route.
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Yes, yes, yes.
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Or a better method.
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Actually, most of us don t move backwards to move forwards.
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We remain stuck because we re too embarrassed to move backwards or we feel too, like we ve reached somewhere to move backwards.
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There s a comfort.
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I don t want to give up the gains that I made.
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Yes, yes, that s exactly it.
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And so when I start over, when I ve already put so much time into getting where I got,
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That sunk cost bias, that was huge for me.
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I remember learning about that in like A-level economics like 18 years, 17, 18 years old and thinking what a great concept to understand that and I kind of gave that up very naturally but I saw that as I grew older people who d studied something
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especially something I had friends who would become lawyers or doctors, but then didn t enjoy it or didn t see that as their path directly even.
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And having to pivot from that was so hard because you work so hard to achieve something that is rare and hard and difficult.
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Yeah, one of the things I would like to remind my students of when they come to office hours and they re in tunnel vision, like I have to do the prescribed thing, like my parents want me to be a doctor or everyone in my family went to law school.
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I always want to say to them, listen, I understand that you re already down this path, like you ve done the pre-med thing or you re already in the program, but what s worse, realizing that you wasted the last two years or going on to waste the next 20?
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It s not a hard calculus.
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And so I think maybe the antidote to sunk cost is opportunity cost to say, yeah, you know what?
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You have already invested a whole bunch in this, but think about all the growth and all the joy that you re giving up on if you don t shift gears.
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Yeah, yeah, I think about that all the time in my own life and it s hard because you never know it then and it s the old Steve Jobs quote of you can t connect the dots moving forward, only backwards and it s hard to remind people almost as their future self and I think that is the activity, that s what I did.
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I fast forwarded when I was working in the corporate world, I fast forwarded 20 years and I asked myself would I be happy doing what I see other people doing 20 years ahead of me and the answer was no and so I was like well then anything will be better than this because if the answer is no and it s not that they had bad jobs or they weren t happy it s that I wouldn t be happy doing what they were doing 20 years from then and so if you re not then you can t keep following the same path
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Adam, I actually have two more questions from you that I just saw in my notes that I actually don t want to miss asking these to you.
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This comes from part three, systems of opportunity, opening doors and windows.
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And I had these two questions that I think are really interesting.
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We talked about certain challenges of our school system and what we find wrong, but this was the interesting part for me.
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Do you believe children should be able to choose what they study?
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I think that s a really fascinating concept.
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One of my friends runs
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schools where kids do get to choose.
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It s private.
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I m always fascinated by this idea of we ve gone from living in a world that kids had no choice.
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We naturally swing to the other side of the pendulum where we want to give kids all choice.
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What did you discover?
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I think this is really complicated.
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So the research on the paradox of choice suggests that there is such a thing as too much choice.
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First of all, there s a lot of debate about how pervasive that is.
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It s much worse to have no choice than too much.
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Much worse.
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So it s easier to manage the problem of too many options than it is to create freedom where it s absent.
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I think that s clear.
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The second thing is we can think about bundling and sort of bucketing choices in a way that maybe gets the best of both worlds.
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So I think it s potentially helpful for students to have choices within constraints.
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For example, so you ask, if you re an elementary school teacher, you ask kids to read 30 minutes a night, but they get to pick the book.
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I think that s the kind of choice we re looking for early on.
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I think later, probably in high school, every kid should take some math, but
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I don t think everyone needs to take trig.
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Trigonometry has never been useful in my life.
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In a heartbeat, I would throw out the trig curriculum and replace it with statistics, which I think actually is useful for how people think and what they do in the world, but not everyone would feel that way.
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There s no cognitive benefits of doing trig either.
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Because I often think about things not being as literal and think, oh wait, is my brain developing by thinking in that way?
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I have never seen a randomized controlled experiment saying that learning trigonometry will teach you a set of thinking skills that s invaluable.
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I don t think there s anything about sine and cosine that you would get that you can t get through geometry.
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It would be my hunch as a psychologist, but I have not done that experiment or that series of experiments.
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But what I would say is within, I mean, colleges are much better at this, right?
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Saying there s a math requirement, but we give you a menu of options and you can choose within that.
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Nobody wants to go to a restaurant and have a menu with a thousand options.
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But if they kind of know what they like, they can say, I can look at that category and I can choose within it.
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And I think that s where I would want choice to land for kids at different levels.
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Yeah.
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And it s so hard to, you know, hidden potential as a kid and as we grow is so difficult because
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If I was asked what I liked growing up now I can easily say that I think I was naturally drawn towards the arts and design and philosophy and I can see it even more clearly now but it would have been really hard for someone, I don t know, how would you be better at spotting hidden potential in schools and in young people earlier on so that we can kind of hopefully better guide and coach people as opposed to have them become pre-meds or complete a career and then having to pivot.
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Well, I think the person who s best suited to see your hidden potential is often the one who knows you best.
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And I don t think we give teachers enough opportunity to get to know kids.
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I love the research on looping that I wrote about in the chapter on what we can learn from countries like Finland and Estonia.
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But even here in the U.S., there s strong evidence from multiple states with millions of students in elementary and middle school that if they just happen to have the same teacher for two years in a row, they achieve more gains in math and reading.
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Which is remarkable.
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And I know there are tons of parents who are afraid of this idea.
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Like, what if my kid gets stuck with Professor Snape for two years instead of one?
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That s the end of the world.
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It turns out that not only is it good for kids to have the same teacher for multiple years, but that when kids are struggling and teachers are struggling, they actually benefit more from the extended relationship.
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And I don t think it s hard to unpack why this is.
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I think when a teacher moves up with a student, they don t lose all this information in the handoff from one to the next.
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They understand the student s strengths and opportunities for growth.
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They also have seen the distance that the student has traveled.
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And so instead of just saying, well, like a new teacher, well, that student didn t shine in math to say, wow, that student was really behind in math and now is right on track with the class.
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I think there s some hidden potential there.
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I think every school on earth should let kids have the same teacher for multiple years.
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And I think it s not a huge effect in the data, but I think it s a meaningful one.
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It is one of the biggest, I mean even in spiritual education and teaching and guidance, that s the only way it works.
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The practices that my monk teachers created for me were very different from what they created for other students because it was all about specific learning and specific growth and so some of the practices I did were not normal for others and some of the practices other people did were not normal for me because you trusted that your teacher was getting to know you better.
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and therefore would create plans whether some of that included travel.
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For example I would be asked to travel back more to London to teach while I was a monk because they saw that that would be a useful skill set for me, that would be a useful experience for me of me going back to the country I was from and having to connect there and that wasn t part of everyone else s training and so
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I ve always been a fan since my training in that way of having the same teacher and even till this day I still go back to the same monk teacher who knows me much better and now he has like so much data on me because he s known me since I was 18 years old and so he has 18 years of insight of knowing me
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and many of those years living together where the his ability to say oh my gosh do you remember when you used to be like this and this challenge would trip you up and look at you now like you know and just that context is so useful to hear from a student uh like you re saying like whether it s hey you know you were struggling with math last year and last year you got c and this year you got b but i actually know it s that you know whatever i i think it s huge i actually think it s huge
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And that s a great coda to the earlier point about you want a coach to work themselves out of a job, but then you want to be able to go back to that coach at inflection points.
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Yes.
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for a fresh perspective or for somebody who has that continuity.
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And so I think over time, the hope is that you don t rely on that person day to day anymore as a crutch, but they are the person who I guess has the most accurate mirror.
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Yeah absolutely and that s at least from a eastern philosophy point of view, education was always meant to be the guru as it would have been called at the time and a small enough class for the guru to get to know the class well enough in order to spot hidden potential and their psychophysical nature and their dharma, word for purpose, in order to ignite that spark deeper.
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And that requires a lot of training for the guru and an openness from the students as well.
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But yeah, you re right.
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It s not just choice as well.
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It s not just like, hey, choose what you want.
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Yeah, it s beautiful.
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Thank you so much, Adam.
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This has been amazing.
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Thank you.
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It s always a joy.
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I love how our conversations go from what s wrong with the school system to why we re not
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idea promoting enough all the way through to, you know, how do we choose what we need to work on?
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What is a weakness?
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What are imperfections?
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And again, it s all inside this book called Hidden Potential, The Science of Achieving Greater Things.
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Highly recommend it from Adam.
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We ll put the link in the comments and the caption for you to get it.
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Thank you so much, Adam, for doing this.
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I appreciate it.
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Thank you, Jay.
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It s been a joy and also a privilege.
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And I think we ve never spoken other than when we re recorded.
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Yes.
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We need to do a little bit more of this, I think.
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SPEAKER_00
I would love that and appreciate and welcome it.
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Thank you so much.
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Thank you.
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Yeah, thanks.
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If you love this episode, you ll enjoy my interview with Dr. Daniel Amen on how to change your life by changing your brain.
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If we want a healthy mind, it actually starts with a healthy brain.
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You know, I ve had the blessing or the curse to scan over a thousand convicted felons and over a hundred murderers and their brains are very damaged.
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SPEAKER_02
Guess what, Will?
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What s that, Mango?
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I ve been trying to write a promo for our podcast Part-Time Genius, but even though we ve done over 250 episodes, we don t really talk about murders or cults.
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SPEAKER_02
I mean, we did just cover the Illuminati of cheese, so I feel like that makes us pretty edgy.
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We also solve mysteries like how Chinese is your Chinese food and how do dollar stores make money?
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And then, of course, can you game a dog show?
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So what you re saying is everyone should be listening.
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Listen to Part-Time Genius on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.