Life Begins At 40: How To Escape The ‘Rat Race’ & Take Back Control Of Your Life – Adam Grant (Transcript)

We also know that if you get a head start and you have access to early coaching, that’s a huge driver of your growth.

And that’s not just true in sports. We also see it in school that kids actually do better on standardized tests when their parents end up tutoring them beforehand or they happen to live in a home where they get access to just a lot of materials, books, resources, and they show up having already done a semester of the material. Obviously they’re going to get an edge.

So I think what we ought to do is we ought to be paying less attention to starting points and more attention to trajectories. What I want to use as an indicator of your future potential is not where you are today. It’s the change between where you were a few months ago and where you’ve arrived at today. And I don’t think we do that often enough.

And we see this with high school grades. So when universities admit students, they use grade point average as an indicator of academic success. And they say, look, the higher your average grades, the smarter you are and the harder working you are. And we want both of those things. So we’re going to take that as an important indicator of your potential.

If you look at the data, your first year of high school grades are irrelevant to predicting how well you’re going to do in college. You’re still developing and it’s also just too far removed. Who you were four or five years ago is just not that meaningful. If we want to know who you’re going to become today, your second year grades become more diagnostic. Your third and fourth year grades are much more meaningful.

Even so, we shouldn’t be averaging those. We should be putting more weight on the recent grades than the grades that happened farther in the past. And then we should also be thinking about improvement over time. I think empirically what we see is students who do better in school and are less likely to drop out, more likely to finish are the ones who have shown some progress over the course of time.

And so somebody who might have gotten a bunch of poor grades their first or second year and then has shown marked progress, that’s actually a signal that they face some extreme challenges and difficulties. And now they’ve figured out how to overcome adversity. And those are students with the character skills to keep growing over time. So I guess I’d like to replace grade point average with grade point trajectory. And we could do the same thing in sports. We could do the same thing in music. We could do the same thing in debate, where we actually compare students to their past selves, and we try to use that information as an indicator of future potential to improve.

Character as Skill, Not Just Will

DR RANGAN CHATTERJEE: You said the word “character skills” there. That’s a really interesting phrase for me. When we think of character, I think a lot of us think of just something we have. You either have character or you don’t. And so I’d love to hear your definition of character, first of all. But then you also mentioned these, I think, three or four character traits or character skills that, in childhood, predict success. So could you speak to those areas?

ADAM GRANT: Yeah. So for a long time, I guess I was an Aristotelian. I thought about character as a matter of will. So Aristotle thought about character basically as a set of virtues that you choose to put into practice and eventually become habit. And psychologists and economists have really overturned that understanding, or at least complicated it, in the last couple decades.

What they’ve shown is that character is not just a matter of will. It’s also a question of skill. So it’s one thing to say, I stand for generosity and humility. It’s another thing to put those principles into practice in difficult moments. And I think that a lot of people confuse character and personality.

I think about personality as your tendency. It’s how you show up on a typical day. Character is how you show up on a hard day. So I think when we look at character skills, I’m really interested in the question of what is the know-how that it takes to convert the priorities that are important to you, those values and principles that you want to stand for, into daily actions.

And this goes, I think, to the research on kindergarten teachers predicting success. So I was just blown away by this evidence. Raj Chetty and his colleagues looked at data from a huge sample of kids who happen to have kindergarten teachers with different years of experience. And it turns out, the more experienced your kindergarten teacher was, the more money you earn in your 20s.

So the idea that you could predict adult success from knowing who taught your kindergarten class, I just found that staggering. And then the big question is, well, why? What is it about experienced kindergarten teachers that allows you to rise and achieve greater things?

And my first assumption was it’s got to be about cognitive skills, that those experienced kindergarten teachers are better at teaching you math and reading, and those cognitive basics set you up for greater success later. It is true that the more experienced kindergarten teachers are better at teaching math and reading, but they only give you a temporary advantage. And over the next few years, first, second, third grade, you tend to catch up.

Where the lasting advantage from an experienced kindergarten teacher lies is actually in character skills, not cognitive skills. And you mentioned there are several of them. The ones that stood out for me in the data were being proactive, pro-social, disciplined, and determined.

So when you have an experienced kindergarten teacher, you learn those character skills early. You’re taught at age 5 to, when you run into an obstacle, to persist as opposed to giving up. You’re taught to try to help your classmates learn and share your knowledge with them. And that’s the pro-social skill. You’re taught to anticipate challenges that you might run into and ask the teacher for help. That’s being proactive.

And it turns out that those skills stick with you. That even in fourth and eighth grade, if you had that experienced kindergarten teacher, you’re still getting rated higher on character skills. And eventually, if we want to predict your adult income, character skills matter almost two and a half times as much as the cognitive skills. So I think those are the skills we ought to be investing in today. And I think that the character skills are really underappreciated.

Character Skills: Success vs. Happiness

DR RANGAN CHATTERJEE: That is super, super interesting. You mentioned that those character skills are associated with income. Now, of course, everyone as a kid or most people, they imagine when they’re older, they’d like to earn decent money, which gives them food, shelter, opportunity to do things that they want to do. But of course, income isn’t the same thing as happiness. Do we know whether those four character skills help predict happiness as well as success, or is it just success?

The Impact of Character Skills on Happiness and Success

ADAM GRANT: Such an interesting question. You’re the first person to ask about this, so I think we can go probably character skill by character skills. So the one that I’ve studied the most throughout my career is pro social skills. And I’ve often looked at that in terms of whether you tend to be a giver or a taker. When you meet people, do you ask, “what can I do for you?” Or are you always trying to figure out what can you do for me?

And empirically, givers are much happier than takers in the long run. They end up with a greater sense of meaning and purpose because they’re able to feel that they make a difference, that they matter in the lives of others. Actually, one of the more interesting things that happens is givers end up with stronger relationships than takers do. And they end up more trusted, they end up with more social capital, with deeper connections, also more respect because other people appreciate and value their contributions. So I think in that one the evidence is clear.

I think when it comes to the other character skills, I would think about them in some ways as preventing unhappiness as opposed to just promoting happiness. I think that part of the value of discipline and determination is it helps you avoid temptations that might in the short run be attractive, but in the long run lead to choices that you would regret. So avoiding forming bad habits, avoiding not eating well, exercising, failing to invest in studying, in learning skills that are maybe a little bit boring but ultimately important.

And I think probably the proactivity literature would suggest also that there’s a whole series of studies suggesting that at work, for example, people who are proactive end up being less dissatisfied with their jobs and end up with higher well being because when they see something they don’t like, they take the initiative to fix it. And not only fix it for themselves, but also try to change the system or the culture to improve it for others. And so I guess the short version of that answer is yes. I think there’s a strong case to be made that these character skills drive happiness as well as success.

The Power of Giving Without Expectation

DR RANGAN CHATTERJEE: Yeah. Thank you, givers or takers. That’s so interesting. I’ve been thinking about this over the summer quite a lot. This idea of doing something without any expectation of something being done for you in return. Because I thought even with your close friends, right, you’re getting something out of that relationship. You are doing stuff for them, you’re being a great friend, hopefully. But you also get something back, don’t you? You also receive those things from that friendship.

And so I’ve consciously, since the summer been trying to do something which is do favors for people with no expectation of them returning one for you. And I’d like to think I did that before. I think I did, but I wasn’t consciously choosing to look at it like that. Does that speak to the pro social part of those four character skills? And is that a strategy you think people could also adopt? After listening to this conversation or after reading your book, could they go in and almost experiment and go, oh, how does that feel? Can I actually interact with the world in this way? Doing things for others, basically being a giver without any expectation of getting anything back.

ADAM GRANT: Yeah, I think this is so fascinating. So I think about giving and taking as two extremes of a spectrum. And very few people are givers or takers in every single interaction they have. But I think about all of us as having a style of interaction, which is, how do you treat most of the people most of the time?

And I found that across cultures, across different fields of work, there are three styles that come up over and over again in the data. So some people default to giving, others default to taking. And then the third orientation is matching. And being a matcher is basically, “I’ll do something for you if you do something for me.” And I think what you’re describing is a shift from a matching approach to helping others to a more purely giving, no strings attached attitude.

And I can tell you in the data that I find that in the long run, not only are givers happier, they’re also more successful than matchers and takers. And part of that is because matchers make the mistake of being too transactional. And when they help, it feels like, well, you didn’t really care about me. You were just doing this to get something back. And so givers end up over time, I think, both feeling and appearing more genuine and that authenticity pays dividends.

I think you have to be careful, though, because there are some givers who burn out. They’re too selfless and they end up sacrificing themselves for others, and that can lead to burnout. That can also lead to other people exploiting you. And so one of my favorite ways to manage that is there’s an entrepreneur, Adam Rifkin, who says, look, you should focus on doing more five minute favors, which is just a small way to try to have big impact on other people.

So sharing a bit of knowledge, just texting somebody to check in and see how they’re doing, even just giving a bit of feedback on somebody’s latest podcast episode and saying, “hey, I listened to that. Here’s something that resonated. Here’s something that I would have loved to hear you discuss that you didn’t.” And the idea is not that we should limit our generosity to five minute chunks, but that a lot of people who want to be givers end up overdoing it at their own expense and being able to set a boundary and say, “look, I want to help other people, but not at a cost to myself, because that’s not sustainable,” is, I think, where we want to land.

The Importance of Self-Care and Setting Boundaries

DR RANGAN CHATTERJEE: Yeah, it’s really fascinating. I think, as you were discussing that and sharing this idea that many of us can burn out by over giving, I think, to a lot of the female patients I’ve seen over the years, again, this is not exclusive to women, but certainly in my medical practice I would see a lot of women, I guess, in their 40s, a lot of the time where there was just too much going on and they felt that they were doing things for their partner, for their children, for their elderly parents, for the school parents association, whatever it might be, and not finding any time for self care, not finding any time to do something for themselves.

And certainly that’s been my clinical experience. And often I would say, “look, I think this is wonderful that you do all these things for everyone else, but I think for your health, you really need to find, even if it’s 15 minutes a day, you’re finding some sort of me time where you do something for you, unashamedly for you, not for anyone else.” And I have seen just that approach be transformative.

And what these women would often say back to me at the next consultation is, “doctor, you gave me permission to relax.” And I found that such an interesting turn of phrase because I never felt in my career that my job was to give my patients permission to do anything. It’s interesting, isn’t it?

ADAM GRANT: I actually think this is, it’s so exciting to me when clinical experience tracks with the research evidence. Exactly. As you’ve seen, women empirically have higher burnout rates than men. And one of the contributing factors is women are more likely to be selfless givers than men. And I think we still live in a world that’s extremely unfair to women in a lot of ways.

But one of the ways is empirically women are more likely to be asked to help than men because we still subscribe to gender stereotypes where we say, look, we expect women to be caring and communal, she wants to help. Whereas a man, no, we’re kind of assuming that he’s going to be ambitious and results oriented. And so we don’t necessarily want to ask, we don’t expect him to be interested in that. This is research by Linda Babcock and colleagues.

And what they show is not only do women face more pressure to give, and this is at work, not just at home, women are more likely to get stuck with the office housework, the taking notes in meetings, the planning events, the thankless mentoring that nobody really appreciates and values, even though it matters. And when women say no, they’re more likely to get penalized for it because they’re violating those unfair expectations that they’re supposed to be helpful. Whereas a man who doesn’t help, it’s like, nah, no big deal.

And then on the flip side, when they say yes, women are taken for granted for doing it. And the data suggests that men are applauded for helping. Like, “what a great guy. I never would have expected him to care about another human being.” And yeah, I think this is a travesty. This has to change. And I think there’s a lot we could say about how to change it.

But I think for starters, when I study this in the workplace, I’ve challenged organizations and their leaders to allocate tasks equitably, to say, “look, we need to figure out all the things that need to be done, and then we need to distribute those across the organization, not just dump them on the people that we think have the inclination to be caregivers.” Ridiculous.

But to your point, I think we also need to really think about how we set our own individual boundaries. And that idea of giving permission to both women and men, anybody who has an inclination towards selflessness to engage in self care and say, “self care is not selfish, it’s actually an act of self preservation.” I think that’s a critical message for you to be delivering and I’m glad you’ve already been doing it.

Understanding and Addressing Burnout

DR RANGAN CHATTERJEE: Let’s talk about burnout, because rates of burnout appear to be on the rise everywhere. From the research I’ve seen, they’ve accelerated over the past few years, particularly in 2020 and 2021. You may have some other research to share, and it’s really interesting if we just take a step back and go, okay, the central idea is that there’s hidden potential within all of us. That’s a central idea, I think in your book and you in a very methodical and step by step way, help us all understand how we can start to uncover some of that hidden potential that lies within us. And of course, burnout is one of those key things. If we are chronically stressed, if we are burning out, well, it’s going to be very hard to reach our potential, isn’t it?

ADAM GRANT: I think that burnout is one of the biggest barriers to reaching our potential. And I mean, burnout has a lot of causes, there’s a massive body of evidence about where it comes from. One of the things we know is that it’s basically a function of the demands you face and your perceived ability to meet those demands. And when demands exceed your perceived ability, you end up in a really difficult situation. And that’s when stress kicks in as a response.

The stress response can be healthy, of course, but to your point, when it’s extremely acute or when it becomes chronic, it becomes counterproductive. And I think one of the, I guess there’s one set of demands that’s a little bit self imposed, which is the daily grind. I think we’ve all heard about deliberate practice. We all know that you’re supposed to push yourself really hard. You’re supposed to pound the pavement if you’re an athlete, if you’re a musician, you’re supposed to drill yourself through long hours of repetition in order to elevate your skills.

And to the point you made earlier, we see a lot of parents kind of pushing their kids to do this. What they don’t realize is that the daily grind is a major source of burnout. We see, for example, that elite junior athletes are actually less likely to rise to world class performance level than athletes who are a little bit behind them at age 12 or 14 or 17. And a factor there is that the very top athletes are more likely to get pushed and push themselves to the edge of exhaustion. And sometimes that means they get injured, sometimes that causes mental health challenges. And sometimes they just decide to give up and they lose their motivation.

From Daily Grind to Deliberate Play

So what I’ve been thinking about a lot is what are our alternatives to that kind of that slog of deliberate practice which can burn a lot of people out. And before that can also lead to what psychologists have called bore out, which is one of my favorite terms, the idea that you can literally be bored out of your mind by the repetitive monotony of a task, which sounds like school for too many people.

So the alternative that I think has some interesting evidence behind it is deliberate play. The idea that you could take the skill that you’re trying to build and break it down and turn it into something that might be fun and enjoyable so that the daily grind actually becomes a source of daily joy.

And Rangan, I’m curious, how have you done this as a medical professional? I’m sure going through medical school was extremely repetitive. I’ve seen tons of medical students and physicians burn themselves out through just putting in an insane number of hours, putting too much pressure on themselves. Did you have any ways to, I guess, make that practice more playful?

The Power of Personal Time and Self-Investment

DR RANGAN CHATTERJEE: Yeah, it’s interesting. So many things are coming up in my mind, Adam, as you asked me that. I guess for much of my adult life, I would say I have been under huge amounts of stress. So some of that has come from work. And yes, being a doctor is or can be very stressful. Long hours, lots of pressure, lots of responsibility.

I’ve also had a lot of responsibilities for caring for elderly parents ever since I was 18, I would say 18 or 19. So throughout my 20s it was with my dads. More recently it’s been with my mum. I live very nearby to where I grew up to help meet those caring responsibilities.

And I would say, when was it? I’d say maybe 2010ish. Around then I was at burnout. I certainly felt very close to burnout. I’ll tell you, Adam, one of the realizations I had was that if on a Saturday morning when I wasn’t working, if I spent two hours doing something for me.

So the concept there is I had a young baby at home, married. My son was maybe 6 to 12 months old. I was feeling so frazzled with work and home pressures that I realized if I go on a Saturday morning… I met someone on a bachelor party who lived near to me, who played golf. And I said, “Oh, I’d love to play golf.” We would get up really early on a Saturday, maybe at 5:30, and I’d be home by 7:30. So we’d play maybe two hours or 90 minutes of golf.

I wasn’t particularly good player. It was really interesting. I learned, Adam, not from any research, I learned that on those weeks where I gave myself 90 minutes on a Saturday morning, the rest of the week seemed to be a lot more manageable. I never resented being asked to do things for the rest of the week.

But when I didn’t have any time to myself, when I thought I was too busy to play, then I would feel stressed, I wouldn’t sleep well, I would start to resent some of the asks. And so I wasn’t thinking about that through the lens of deliberate play. The way I conclude that experience is that I invested in myself each week and simply by doing that one thing, it made the other six or seven days much more tolerable. So I don’t know if that speaks to what you’re talking about here or not, but that’s certainly how I would answer that question.

Hobbies as a Source of Energy and Confidence

ADAM GRANT: It does. I think it actually speaks to the research on hobbies as a source of not only energy but also confidence. So I find this research fascinating that if you think about the struggles people have in their jobs and the stress of wondering, “Can I do it all?” The last thing you would ever think to advise is, “Well, you should now spend time doing something that doesn’t seem at all productive because inevitably you’re just going to feel further behind.”

But what the research shows is that if you take on a hobby that’s completely different from your job and you’re able to gain a sense of progress, you don’t have to become a world class golfer. And I would probably discourage that. But you feel like, “I’m getting better at something. I enjoy that.” That actually creates a sense of self-efficacy, a level of confidence that then carries over into your job and allows you to feel more capable of managing the stress.

And I think that’s especially important when we feel like we’ve hit a wall. So there’s a sociologist, Corey Keyes, who coined this term that I found extremely powerful: languishing, which I wrote about during COVID as what I thought was the dominant emotion of 2021.

DR RANGAN CHATTERJEE: There was a New York Times article I think I read that you wrote, right, on languishing from recollection.

Understanding Languishing

ADAM GRANT: I did, yeah. And everywhere around I felt like people were saying, “I’m just feeling meh or blah.” And I was hearing people talk about this sense of emptiness and stagnation and ennui. And I think that languishing happens in part because we feel stuck. And during COVID it felt like the whole world was standing still.

And so people… I think it’s worth noting, languishing is sort of in the middle of the mental health spectrum. It’s not depression because you still have hope. It’s not burnout. You still have some energy, but you’re also not at flourishing or peak well-being.

Keyes actually defines it as the absence of well-being as opposed to the presence of ill-being and says that basically languishing is when you’re missing a full sense of purpose and meaning in your life. And I’ve started to think about it as the neglected middle child of mental health. We don’t really talk about how to deal with languishing.

But to come back to your point, I think for a lot of people languishing is an early warning sign of depression and anxiety. And in fact, there’s some evidence to suggest that the people at greatest risk for depression and anxiety disorders over the next decade are not the ones who are experiencing them right now. They’re the people who are languishing today.

Because when you’re depressed or anxious, that is a strong signal: “I need to do something or I need to seek help.” Whereas languishing kind of lives below the radar. And it’s easy to overlook and not realize that you’re getting a dulling of delight, that your motivation is dwindling and you’re lacking drive. And at some point that can be a real harbinger of greater problems.

So I think your idea of saying, “What’s a hobby that I really enjoy where I can gain a sense of mastery and also I can feel like I matter?” Ideally, you’re golfing with people that you care about or you want to build a closer connection with. That can jolt you out of a languishing state and move you a little bit closer to flourishing.

The Transformative Power of Unrelated Hobbies

DR RANGAN CHATTERJEE: Yeah, I’m so glad you are talking about hobbies. And I wonder what you think may be going on in our brains or in our entire beings when we do a hobby. I noticed that you say it should be a hobby unrelated to your work. And I’ve got to say, in my experience, that is so, so key.

In my second book on stress, there was a case study in that book, this 53-year-old CEO who essentially had symptoms consistent with a diagnosis of depression. And he was very blah. He was very indifferent about his relationship with his wife, with his job, with his children.

And without going into all the details of that story, essentially what I asked him to do was reconnect with the train set that he used to play with as a teenager. He got the train set out of his loft. He hadn’t done it in years. Because, you know, he’s an adult. I mean, adults don’t play with train sets anymore. That was something he did as a kid.

But it did something to him whereby six months later he’s feeling like a different person. He’s starting to enjoy his job more. He’s closer with his wife, he’s closer with his kids. We didn’t put him on medication, nothing. It was simply by introducing a hobby, a passion that was completely unrelated to work. It’s funny how everything else in his life started to come back online.

So have you seen this? And why is it that we think we don’t have time for hobbies anymore as we become adults?

Play Belongs on Your To-Do List

ADAM GRANT: Rangan, honestly, I’ve lived it. Yeah, during the pandemic I found myself breaking a bunch of my personal rules and I could not make sense of it. So I think most people have to-do lists. For a long time, I’ve also kept a to-don’t list.

So on my to-don’t list is: don’t pick up my phone after 9pm, don’t turn on the TV unless I already know what I want to watch, don’t doom scroll. And I’m normally pretty good at sticking to these rules, but I remember, I think it was end of 2020, early 2021, I found myself… I actually binged an entire season of a TV show and then at the end, “Wait, I think I’ve already seen this.” And I was so zoned out that I didn’t even notice that I’d gone through it before.

And I’m doom scrolling on my phone past midnight. I’m like, “What am I doing? What has become of me?” And there was a term for what I was doing that I came across: it was called revenge bedtime procrastination, which I thought was a great concept.

And as I thought about it, I realized, “Yeah, this is happening.” The problem is I’ve got this endless to-do list during the day and I feel like I’m constantly behind. And I have people who want me to deliver. They’re asking me to read their manuscripts, they’re seeking out help. I’ve got a bunch of projects that I don’t want to fall behind on.

So I’m basically saving play until I’ve finished all my tasks. And the only time is at night. And so I’m delaying going to bed and then, by the way, waking up exhausted in the morning because it’s my one chance to do something enjoyable.

And I think what hit me as I went through that was that play should not be a reward for finishing my to-do list. It actually belongs on my to-do list.

Finding Joy Through Gaming

And we couldn’t really go anywhere or do anything at that point in the pandemic. So we ended up, my kids decided that we should play more Mario Kart, which was my favorite Nintendo game as a kid. And my sister who lived halfway across the country and her husband are big Mario Kart fans. And so we started playing online Mario Kart.

And at first we did a Saturday night game where we would actually FaceTime with them so we could trash talk each other. And then we started playing every other day. And then pretty soon we were playing every day. And first of all, my kids were so excited, they would wake up in the morning and ask, “What time is Mario Kart?”

But I also got a real jolt out of it. I felt, strangely enough, a sense of mastery. There’s… I don’t think there are many satisfactions quite like a perfectly aimed green shell that takes out my brother-in-law. And I got these little, they’re tiny wins. But I felt like I could do something.

I think it also probably similar to your experience with golf, it required my full attention and so it gave a sense of mindfulness. I couldn’t be distracted by my phone. If I looked away from the screen even a second, my car would spin out.

But most importantly, that sense of mattering. I felt like I was able to do something to make this experience a little bit less miserable for my kids. And I also felt connected to my extended family who are far away. And I think that kind of hobby that you do with people you love is a great source of joy and also a way maybe to jolt yourself out of languishing a bit.

The Power of Hobbies for Mental Rest

DR RANGAN CHATTERJEE: Yeah, I love that, Adam. And I’ve come to think we need to give hobbies the same level of importance when it comes to our health and well being as the food on our plates or how often we move our bodies. I really, really believe it’s that important. Particularly now in an era where burnout rates are going up.

Our to-do lists are frankly never done. You could clear your email inbox and literally go and make a cup of tea. In that time, you could have accumulated another 10 emails. There’s no way you can control that.

And I realized a few months ago, I think a bit like you, Adam, that you know what? My life appears to be my work, my wife and kids, and looking after my mum. Don’t get me wrong, I love my job, I love my wife and kids, and I love my mum, right. So there’s nothing negative about that. But I thought, I’m missing something. There’s something missing.

You know, I’m always thinking about work or the next podcast or what I need to do for my mom or whatever it might be. And so I used to play table tennis as a teenager, right. I recently, literally in the last few weeks, found a local club, joined, went to their trial, they put me on the team, I’ve started playing, haven’t played in 30 years properly.

And I remember the first time I went to a game, I came back, my wife was still up, and I said, “I just thought for the last two and a half hours, I have not thought about my wife or my kids or my mum or my work or the next podcast guest. I was totally switched off and I loved it. I absolutely loved it.”

And you know, the funny thing is, when I think of burnout, Adam, obviously one of the antidotes to burnout might appear to be rest, right? We might go, okay, burnout is when we’re doing too much, so we need to rest. But I think even the term rest becomes problematic because rest implies sitting on my sofa, going to bed early. But I kind of feel we need mental rest as well. And I feel hobbies give us a form of mental rest.

Two Types of Recovery Activities

ADAM GRANT: They do. This is, I think you’re speaking to Sabina Sonnentag’s research where she shows there are two kinds of activities that help us recover from stress at work and that prevent burnout.

And one set of activities are relaxation oriented. Reading a book, watching TV, taking a warm bath, meditating. The other set are actually mastery activities, where you take on new challenges. And one of her recommendations, I had her on a podcast recently and she suggested we should try to do our mastery activities earlier in the day for stimulation and then relaxation is better later as we’re trying to wind down.

But I think there’s something really critical here that a lot of people miss out on, which is you actually feel a bit of a sense of rest and reprieve when you’re doing mastery activities. Because just like you’re describing with table tennis or what we’ve always called ping pong here in the US, which is a ridiculous name for the sport, I think what you’re getting into is a flow state, which I’m sure a lot of people know the pathbreaking work that Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi did on flow, that sense of total absorption where you’re in a zone and exactly as you’re describing it, your sense of time and place melts away.

Sometimes you even forget who you are. There’s no self consciousness. And for a lot of people, a flow state is peak meditation where you can become sort of one with the activity.

And there is some solid evidence suggesting that actually this was, you could see this in the early stages of COVID. There were some people who managed to maintain their well being even as their countries went into lockdown. And I had assumed that those were going to be the most optimistic, enthusiastic people that they were. You know, they were just wired or carefully practiced to look on the bright side of a hard situation.

But the best predictor of maintaining your well being in lockdown was not optimism, it was finding flow. People who had projects, hobbies, activities that got them into that zone. They experienced that sense of deep focus and enjoyment, but they didn’t even notice that they were enjoying it until after the fact. And they’d say, “Oh yeah, that table tennis game was really fun.”

And I think this is why so many people got into sourdough baking. Yeah, they were able to find flow doing that. I think this is why Wordle took off. It was, you know, just kind of a small, even spend a few minutes trying to solve a word puzzle and you feel like, all right, I got absorbed in that. And also I feel like I accomplished something today. And that was one of those small wins.

Finding Your Flow Activity

DR RANGAN CHATTERJEE: For someone listening or watching Adam, who thinks, okay, you’ve sold me on this idea. I need to get into flow state more. I need to find a hobby, but my life’s too busy. I’m an adult, I’ve got responsibilities. I don’t even know what I want to do. Do you have any advice for them?

ADAM GRANT: Yeah, I think where I would start is to figure out who you’re already spending time with and can you make some of that time more hobby oriented? So, you know, a lot of families have TV time. What if you shifted some of that to family board game time and let your kids pick the board game?

The dinner or drinks or the lunch that you go out to with friends? What if that was a hobby instead? And I think, I guess I think about this a little bit as, you know, we don’t always know where we find flow.

One of the more surprising findings in the flow literature is that a lot of people find flow driving because there’s something about the rhythm of that activity that allows people to sort of disconnect from all the other distractions that they might have. And it does require a level of concentration where you should not be multitasking.

But I think a lot of people are not really clear on, well, what’s a good activity that’s a source of flow for me? And I think the broad guidelines are you want something that requires your full concentration so you don’t get distracted. You want a task that’s reasonably challenging, that does bring your full attention, and you want it to be something that you enjoy the process of doing, regardless of what the outcome might be.

But I think that still leaves a lot of options open. And so you have to frequently try a lot of activities until you find the one that works for you.

The Importance of Single-Tasking

DR RANGAN CHATTERJEE: You mentioned for those people who find flow when driving, it’s one of those activities where you can only really be doing one activity at a time. You’re concentrating on the road, or you certainly should be concentrating just on the roads.

I’ve heard you talk in the past about how diving is something that taught you the importance of doing one thing at a time. Why is it important that we are only doing one thing at a time? But also what does that do for us to explore our own hidden potential?

ADAM GRANT: Well, I think computers are good at parallel processing, right? You can have multiple windows running at the same time. You can have downloads happening in the background. Humans are serial processors. As far as I know, the brain can only focus well on one thing at a time.

And I know there’s somebody who’s going to say, “Wait a minute, I am a great multitasker.” It turns out there’s research on this suggesting that the people who multitask the most are actually the worst at it. And what you’re really doing is just rapid task switching from one task back and forth to the next, which actually undermines your performance on both of them.

I’ve read some evidence that roughly two and a half percent of people are super taskers, meaning they can do two tasks without performance in either one suffering. But guess what? They don’t get a benefit from doing that. It’s not that they’re better at either task, it’s just that they don’t show a decrement in their performance. And so they’re not really getting an advantage either.

And I think the research suggests that most of us, when we multitask, end up, you know, we end up distracted away from one task to focus on another, and then we lose our attention and then we basically interrupt ourselves right out of flow.

There’s some evidence to suggest that the average person checks their email 70 some times a day. Hard to get into a flow state when you’re looking at your phone every third minute. So I think we need to be really cautious about that.

And a big part of, I guess, unlocking your hidden potential is asking yourself, what are the people and projects that matter to me today? And then can I block out a window of time where I’m going to have uninterrupted focus just on one project? And of course, you want to build breaks into that time, but you don’t want to be jolting yourself out of flow every couple minutes.

Teaching Character Skills to Children

DR RANGAN CHATTERJEE: I want to talk about perfectionism. Shortly before we do that, I just want to tie a loop in our conversation about character skills. You mentioned those four character skills earlier on in this conversation. You know, being proactive, pro social, disciplined and determined.

And you mentioned the research showing that an experienced kindergarten teacher can help children develop those traits and those skills. I guess if you don’t have the luxury of a wonderful kindergarten teacher, is there anything a parent can do to help develop those skills with our children? I think it’s the first point I wanted to make.

And the second question relating to that is to do with the fact that you refer to them as skills. And when I hear that something is a skill, I hear, oh, this is something I can cultivate, this is something I can develop, this is something I can learn and get better at. So these are not necessarily things that you are born with, they’re things that you can learn.

ADAM GRANT: Yes, well put. So let’s talk about pro social skills, because I think they’re the most poorly taught. I think most parents know that they need to teach their kids to be disciplined, determined, proactive. And that’s, you know, that’s part of building grit and developing their work ethic. I think pro social skills get neglected.

There was a study a few years ago showing that parents said the number one thing on average, that they wanted for their kids, this is here in the US, their top priority was for their kids to be caring and kind. But their kids thought that their parents put achievement first, that their parents wanted them to be successful more than caring.

And I think the reason that happens is the conversations we have with our kids are about excellence. They’re about accomplishment. Right. Our kids get home from school, and my first impulse is to ask, “What grade did you get on the test? Did you score a goal in soccer?” And that sends an implicit message. What we talk about is what we care about.

And so we’re paying all this attention to achievement, and our kids internalize the idea that in order for my parents to be proud of me, I need to be a superstar high achiever. And so I think we need to shift that balance. We need to teach the pro social skills.

The “Who Did You Help?” Question

So the first way that I started doing this, informed by some of the research, was I started asking our kids, “Who did you help this week?” And it became a weekly dinner table conversation. And I wanted them to focus on, what can I do for others?

And I knew when I started asking the question, it was going to shift their attention. And they would come to dinner on Friday knowing they’re going to be asked who they helped. And so they would look for opportunities over the course of the week.

Well, then we can start to see patterns. We can see that they have natural skills in certain areas of helping. One of our kids was always sharing, another was, you know, trying to problem solve with homework and, you know, and see, look for a classmate who was struggling. And they realized that’s a skill activity. Right? It takes skill to notice and figure out what other people need and then to help them find a solution to their problem.

And so I found this really powerful to, you know, to ask, “Who did you help?” Yeah. And then my wife, Allison said, “We need to add a second question to this conversation. We need to also ask them who helped them.”

And I was wrong. And I was extremely confused by this. I was like, “Wait, I want them to be givers, not takers. Why are we asking them what they got?”

And Allison said, I just, I thought this was brilliant. She said, “I want them to pay attention to who the givers are. I want them to not just gravitate toward the coolest kids or the hottest kids or the best athlete or you know, whatever, whatever kids are normally drawn to that gives them status. When I ask them, who helped you? I’m refocusing their attention on kindness and I’m helping them build the skill of noticing who the giving kids are and then learning to build friendships with them and join those groups.”

So that’s probably my favorite way to begin building those pro social skills.

DR RANGAN CHATTERJEE: I just, I love that so much. And it’s really funny, Adam, you know, when you are studying someone to talk to on your podcast, like I go deep, I read their books, I watch videos. I really try and get into my head, who is this person? And I saw quite a few similarities actually between you and me that I really connect with.

And what’s interesting is you were describing that game that I’ve spoken about publicly for many years that we play as a family, my wife, myself and my kids. We ask ourselves three questions over the dinner table, which is quite similar but slightly different to what you guys do on a Friday. We say, “What did you do to make someone else happy today? What did someone else do to make you happy today? And what have you learned today?”

And it’s really interesting. It’s a very similar kind of ethos, I think, to what you guys do in your family. And I know that your wife had an idea of how to develop that and add that second question. It’s really interesting. My daughter, she’s now 10, but I think about two or three years ago, when she was seven, she said, “Daddy, I think there should be another question here.” And I said, “Okay, darling, sure. What do you think the question should be?”

And she said, after we answered the question, “What did I do for someone else today?” or “What did I do to make someone else happy?” She said, “I think we should also ask how did I feel straight after I did something to make them happy.”

ADAM GRANT: I love that.

DR RANGAN CHATTERJEE: It’s great, isn’t it?

ADAM GRANT: Because you’re reinforcing the activity and reminding yourself this was not just something that benefited another person. It’s also energizing and life giving for me.

Seeking Parenting Advice on External Validation

DR RANGAN CHATTERJEE: Yeah. Now I’m going to have some parenting advice from you, if that’s okay, Adam. So I was a kid and I think this is very common in immigrant families. I felt that my self worth and love from my parents was dependent on my results. And I’m not blaming my parents for that. They had their reasons for pushing me to do the best that I could.

But I’ve realized that for much of my life, I have needed external validation to feel good about myself. And I think it’s been really toxic. So, like many parents, I’m trying to go to another extreme with my own kids. So when they come back from a test or an exam, or they’ve been playing netball or football or whatever it might be, I will say, “Did you enjoy it?” Or they come up with a test, I’ll be, “Hey, did you try your best?”

And it’s now become a bit of a joke in the family. “Oh, Daddy’s going to not ask me what I got in the test. He’s just going to say, did I enjoy it?” Now, I want to know what you think as a psychologist of that approach.

ADAM GRANT: It’s really hard to know whether you’re succeeding as a parent. And I’m muddling through this just like the rest of us. I think I really like the approach you’ve taken. I think we all need to pay attention to our attention as parents. Right? What we pay attention to is a signal of what we value.

And so the fact that you’re asking your kids, “Do you enjoy it?” you’re communicating the message that you didn’t hear growing up, which is that intrinsic motivation matters, that you’re trying to focus their energy on the process and the experience, not just the result.

DR RANGAN CHATTERJEE: And I think it’s important sometimes to recognize that because my parents were immigrants, right. They faced discrimination, so their approach is no wrong. And you need to ace everything. You need to be a straight A student. And if you do that, you won’t have the problems that we had, but you develop other problems, right?

ADAM GRANT: Yes.

DR RANGAN CHATTERJEE: Yes.

The Missing Piece: Learned Industriousness

ADAM GRANT: We’re going to talk about perfectionism, which is, I think, at the heart of this challenge. I think you just hit on what I think is missing from just asking, “Did you enjoy it?” Which is, I wrote about learned industriousness, which is the idea that when you’re praised for effort repeatedly, that over time, the feeling of hard work itself can take on secondary reward properties.

And independent of the result you get, you can get a jolt of energy from feeling like, “Yeah, I gave that my all.” And we don’t want to deprive kids of that. We want them to learn to enjoy effort. So I would say, in addition to asking them, “Did you enjoy it?” you want to validate, “Hey, you put a lot of effort into this.”

But I also don’t want to stop there, because hard work itself, this is actually something I’ve been rethinking lately. I used to think that hard work was a virtue, and I no longer believe that. I think that hard work is a means to an end and it’s only virtuous if the ends are worthy.

And what that means for me is that we need to also not just praise the effort that kids put in and not just help them develop an identity as somebody who can persist and overcome challenges, but also praise the progress they’ve made and get them to think about, “Yeah, I put in a lot of effort and I enjoyed the process and I improved.” And that will help them move toward excellence and mastery in whatever they decide to set their minds to.

So I guess those are the maybe potential missing pieces, but I think that it’s fair to say that a lot of kids are getting the other messages. And so for you, as a parent, asking, “Did you enjoy it?” is the most important antidote to a culture that worships grit and hustle and expects kids to put that above all else.

DR RANGAN CHATTERJEE: Yeah. Let’s talk about perfectionism, because I think it really speaks to what we’ve just been discussing.

ADAM GRANT: Right.

The Rise of Perfectionism

DR RANGAN CHATTERJEE: And I am certainly a perfectionist in recovery. What’s the problem with perfectionism and why is it on the rise?

ADAM GRANT: Well, full disclosure. Last month I wrote a quiz on character skills to try to help people identify theirs and unlock their hidden potential. And it was sort of a combination of psychometrics and entertainment. And of course, as you always do when you write an assessment, I took it and I just finished writing an entire chapter about how I’d overcome perfectionism.

And my lowest score was on accepting imperfections. So I’m better than I was, but I am far from perfect accepting being imperfect, which I guess is part of the point. So I feel your pain there.

DR RANGAN CHATTERJEE: Yeah.

ADAM GRANT: So the research, this is Thomas Curran in London and his colleagues. They’ve done meta analyses, studies of studies where they show that starting, I believe, in the late 1980s, for about a quarter century, perfectionism has risen in kids and in students. And it seems to be the case. This is true in the UK. It’s in the US. Also in Canada.

It seems to be that two of the big factors have to do with parental pressure. That kids feel that their parents are increasingly holding them to unrealistic expectations and giving them extremely harsh criticism if they don’t meet those expectations. And what that does is that sets up an expectation for kids that they need to be flawless, that they’re never good enough.

And you would think that would help them reach excellence. Guess what? It doesn’t. Perfectionists do get better marks in school, they get higher grades, they do not perform any better in their jobs, they don’t have greater career success. And let’s talk about why that is. So, as a perfectionist, what challenges has that created for you?

DR RANGAN CHATTERJEE: I mean, where to start?

ADAM GRANT: Right.

DR RANGAN CHATTERJEE: So many. But I tell you, one of the big things that I’ve realized over the past few years is that perfectionism was so toxic for me that I wouldn’t do anything that I couldn’t be the best at. I would limit myself from experiencing the world. Let’s say a sport with a friend, I wouldn’t play. If I thought I can’t be the best and win at this and beat my mates, I wouldn’t play.

And now I think as a parent, wow, you limited your entire experience of the world because you had to win. Now, what’s really interesting, Adam, is that I’ve realized it’s not that I even enjoyed winning. The pain of losing was so great that I couldn’t bear to put myself in a position where I could lose. So I could give you many answers as to the problems. But that’s certainly problem number one that comes to mind.

ADAM GRANT: That’s one that stands out over and over again in the evidence is perfectionists avoid anything where they might fail. And the side effect of that is that they don’t take on new challenges, they don’t take risks, they don’t stretch beyond their comfort zones, they don’t work on things that they might have weaknesses in.

And I think, I mean, honestly, if perfectionism was a medication, I think it would come with a warning label. Warning: may cause stunted growth.

Why Perfectionism Increased Before Social Media

DR RANGAN CHATTERJEE: Why did it increase in the 1980s? I think there’s a natural tendency to think that this is because of social media. But social media started, what, 2005, maybe 2007, something like that. But you’re saying the research suggests that this has been increasing since the 1980s. That was pre social media. Why have parental expectations gone through the roof?

ADAM GRANT: Yeah, it’s a great question. Let’s be clear. I don’t think social media has helped. Right. I think, you know, particularly for teenage girls, we know a lot about the challenges it can create. But, you know, this is, you’re right. This is a whole generation before social media even existed.

I think the most compelling evidence I’ve read so far, and I would say this is very much an open question, suggests that it seems to be an increasingly competitive world that’s created these challenges. So it’s harder and harder to get into university. And that means that, you know, I mean, there aren’t more spots at top schools, but there are more kids applying to top schools.

And that means that parents feel like they have to push their kids that much harder to be perfect in order to give them the opportunity. It’s exactly what you were describing your parents having done. And they’re doing it with good intentions. They want you to have opportunities that they didn’t get.

And I think the unintended consequence of that, of course, is that not only do you end up limiting your growth, you are at risk for burnout. Perfectionism is a consistent predictor of burnout. Feeling like you’re never enough. Ruminating about why you screwed up, why you didn’t get an A plus when you got an A, is really miserable, and you end up constantly shaming yourself for your past mistakes.

I think that the parents have felt that they have to do that for their kids to get ahead. And I don’t think in the long run, that is something that ultimately serves kids. But I understand why parents do it.

DR RANGAN CHATTERJEE: Because I was going to try and play devil’s advocate there and think about the viewer who’s going, “Okay, Adam. Okay, Rangan. You guys are talking about the problems with perfectionism, but you both were perfectionists, and you two seem to be doing pretty okay with your lives.” What would you say to that person?

# Life Begins At 40: How To Escape The ‘Rat Race’ & Take Back Control Of Your Life

The Liability of Perfectionism

ADAM GRANT: Counterpoint. Perfectionism has been more of a liability than an asset in my life. And I think the clearest example for me is my days as a wannabe athlete when I was a springboard diver. So I was—let’s be clear, I was too short for basketball. I was too slow for track. I didn’t make the soccer team, or, sorry, I should say football team. And I kind of—I love sports. I found out I didn’t have the physical ability for all the initial ones I tried.

And then I stumbled into springboard diving, and I lacked talent there, too. I walked like Frankenstein, according to my teammates. I couldn’t touch my toes without bending my knees. I didn’t jump very high. I didn’t have a lot of grace or explosive power, not cut out for the sport.

And I thought that perfectionism was going to be a huge advantage for me because in diving, you’re supposed to get perfect 10. What I didn’t know is that’s actually a misnomer. There’s no such thing as a perfect 10. If you look up the rule book, as my coach told me, “a ten is for excellence, not for perfection.” And even a dive that gets all tens in the Olympics, I can watch it without even slow mo. I can tell you at least a dozen things that were wrong with it.

And in order to become a better diver, I had to cure myself of the worst parts of my perfectionism. So here’s how perfectionism hurt me.

Number one, I wasted a lot of time trying to perfect dives that were already pretty good, as opposed to challenging myself to learn harder dives. And that limited my degree of difficulty because I didn’t want to move on from just a simple front dive in the pike position. And meanwhile, my teammates are doing a front two and a half and scoring a lot more points.

Secondly, I just obsessed about things that didn’t matter. I actually got an award. We did paper plate awards at the end of the season, where you get an award that made fun of you, basically. And I think my second year, the award was the “if only” award. And it had a picture of me saying, “if only I had pointed my left pinky toe on that entry, I would have gotten an eight and a half instead of an eight.”

And that didn’t really matter. Instead of looking at what my toe looked like going in the water, I should have been stretching so I could actually get into a tighter pike or tuck and spin faster and score higher.

The Problem of Balking

Biggest problem for me in perfectionism was balking. So if you picture a diver walking down the board, if you’re going to do a front or reverse takeoff, you walk to the end and then you jump to the edge and then you leap. Well, I didn’t do that. I would start my approach down the board, and if I was a little bit off balance, if I was leaning a little bit forward or too far backward or off to the side, or I stomped the board and didn’t get the rhythm, I would stop and turn around.

Because as my coach Eric told me, I’ve already failed as a perfectionist. This is not a perfect takeoff. And so why bother? And so I would stop and start and stop and start and stop and start over and over again to the point where I did about a third as many dives in a typical practice as I should have.

And all of those mistakes held me back big time. And it was only when Eric sat me down and said, “Listen, we’re not aiming for perfection. We’re aiming for excellence on a good day. But we need to sit down and give a reasonable target score for every dive you’re doing. So your front dive, yeah, we can aim for six, six and a half, maybe shoot for seven. But as you’re learning how to do much more complicated dives, we just want to make them. We’re going to be happy with twos and threes today because just making the dive is going to get you toward that higher degree of difficulty.”

And that’s when I started improving as a diver. And fast forward three years, I go from being the worst diver in my school to competing in the Junior Olympic Nationals. And it happened because I stopped aiming for perfect, and I started trying to figure out what’s a realistic goal for improvement.

DR RANGAN CHATTERJEE: How does that play out for you when you are writing a book? At some point you would have had to say on your manuscript, the Hidden Potential, “Okay, I’m done. This is now going to print.” But as I know, your thoughts don’t stop the minute it goes to print. So how do you approach book writing knowing that you have a tendency to perfectionism?

Setting Target Scores for Different Tasks

ADAM GRANT: Well, I’ve actually taken what I learned from diving and put it right into practice for book writing. And I think this actually applies to any task, but I’ll give you the book version of it.

So a book is my highest target score wise. I’m going to pour a couple years of my life into it, and actually more if you count the research before the writing process. So it’s a huge commitment of time and energy for me. And if it goes well, a lot of people are going to read it. And I want to make sure I’ve really written the best book I can at this time on this topic.

And notice I said “this time.” I didn’t used to have that. I just want to write the best book I can. No, the best book I can right now at this point in my life, with the knowledge and skills that I have. That’s me trying to become a better imperfectionist.

But what I do is I have a group of trusted colleagues who are basically my judges, just like I had in diving. In diving, I would pop out of the water. I would ask my coach, “What score did I get?” We would compare that to my target score, and that would help us decide whether we needed to do another and keep working at it or whether it was okay to move on.

Book writing is the exact same way. I ask them all independently to score the chapter draft. And I do this for each chapter. It’s a 0 to 10 scale, just like in diving. And I will not consider the chapter complete until every one of them independently gives at least a nine. And that nine is very deliberate because I think even tens are an unrealistic bar. So that’s the book writing part of it.

I can’t aim for nines in every single task I do. If that happens, my book will never hit the nine. So for social media, I usually aim for about a six and a half. For me, that’s the bar right above what might get me canceled. You don’t have to agree with everything I think. I don’t even agree with everything I think.

But I think the opportunity here for anybody who struggles with perfectionism is to say, “How important is this task?” The more important it is, the higher the score I need to aim for. And if this is not that important or people are not going to take this as a reflection of me, I don’t need to be in the 8 or 9 range.

Perfectionism in Society

DR RANGAN CHATTERJEE: Yeah, it’s so interesting. It’s funny, as you were talking about perfectionism there, as it affects an individual, I was thinking about how it has affected an entire society and a culture.

Now I do accept the social media as a very particular medium where we don’t get all the signals and signs that we get if we’re face to face in a room. Body language, posture, facial expressions. But I feel that people are perfectionists about themselves, so they don’t tolerate any mistake from themselves. And they also project that onto other people.

It’s as if we can’t even tolerate people we admire having any flaws at all. I don’t know if you’ve experienced this and what your perspective might be on that, because I almost think it’s reverse perfectionism that we’re projecting what we have onto ourselves.

ADAM GRANT: Yeah, I think this is really important. And yes, I have definitely experienced this. One day, I think I’d posted something that was a little controversial, and I didn’t even realize that it was controversial.

I was making a point about emotion regulation, and I was thinking about this huge body of research on cognitive reappraisal of emotions, about how a key skill in emotional intelligence is not internalizing everything you feel, but rather treating your emotions as a rough draft and saying—just as if you were an artist, you wouldn’t frame your first draft, you would keep refining it. And we do this as writers all the time. You shouldn’t valorize or reify the first emotion you feel. You should reflect on it and question it and let it evolve.

And the point of my post was to say that sometimes we make the mistake of internalizing these emotions that we shouldn’t accept and we blame other people for them. And technically, nobody else can directly cause an emotion in you. What the evidence shows is this is the classic misattributed to Viktor Frankl: “Between stimulus and response, there’s a space, and in that space is your interpretation.”

And if you punch me in the face, I might get really angry at you. But if I interpret that differently because we’re at boxing class and we’re sparring, I might not get mad at you. I might get mad at myself for having my gloves down, right? And so even the physical act of being punched in the face, my interpretation of that act is going to change my emotion in response to it.

The Social Media Backlash

So I was trying to make that point. Massive number of people on my Instagram freaked out and said—because I basically said, “you made me feel” is a false statement. Nobody should be able to have direct power over your emotions. And what you should be doing is thinking about, “this is how I reacted to your actions.”

Well, a bunch of people thought about that in the context of abusive relationships and said, “No, this is gaslighting. This is what an abuser says. I’m not making you feel anything. That’s your—the emotion that’s on you. That’s all in your head.”

And of course, that was not at all what I was saying. I was talking about in everyday interactions, we should take ownership over our own feelings and hold other people accountable for their actions. And I failed to say that. I should have said, “It’s not that you make me feel anything. I can control my own emotional reaction. And I don’t always get to choose the first one, but I can decide how to process it. But I can still tell you that what you did is wrong. And the way you’re treating me is unacceptable. It’s not the way you’re making me feel, it’s what you did.”

So anyway, I failed to do that. And a ton of people unfollowed me. I was like, “Wait, what happened to the year’s worth of posts that you had liked and commented on?” And if you disagree with one thing that I say and take it out of context, and I could have been much clearer about that context, then all of a sudden, I’m no longer a person who has anything worthwhile to say.

I think we are way too quick to judge people. And Jonathan Haidt has said this well: we ought to be slower to judge and quicker to forgive because we are all human.

DR RANGAN CHATTERJEE: Yeah, thank you for sharing that. I know exactly what you mean.

The Cost of Self-Censorship

The problem is anything, when taken to an extreme, can be shown to be problematic. And it reminds me of something that Rick Rubin said to me when he came on my show about a year ago. I don’t want to misspeak for Rick, but we were talking about our negative inner voice and he was saying something to the effect that that negative inner voice that you have inside you becomes a problem, becomes a real problem when it stops you sharing what’s in your heart.

I think this is the big problem we have now because of cancel culture, because of all these things, people are too afraid. I fall into this trap. Much of the time I’m like, “You know what? I don’t want to get involved in this because it’s just going to set off a whole incendiary debate. And I don’t want that on my wall. It’s not what I’m here to do. I want to help change the world through compassion and curiosity.”

And I think that’s where it becomes really problematic, is that people stop being authentic and sharing real things. And I’ve been in that position where I’ve had a thought—I think there’s something to this. I want to share it on Twitter and Instagram. And sometimes you let that voice get the better of you. “Yeah, but you know, it’s not quite right. I can make that better.”

And then six months go by, and you’ve never shared that thought, that could have been really helpful—a) for people reading it, but also the feedback could have been really helpful for me. So you sort of stagnate, don’t you?

The Value of Multiple Perspectives

ADAM GRANT: You do. You do. I think the way you just described that is profound. I think it’s so common for people to second guess themselves and be afraid of the reactions. Forgetting, of course, that, as long as it’s not egregious, you’re going to learn something from the reactions and then evolve your thinking.

I think the mistake that a lot of people make in this situation is they end up defining themselves by what they believe. And just as you shouldn’t internalize everything you feel—that’s part of emotional intelligence—I think a mark of wisdom is not believing everything you think and rejecting thoughts that come to you or at least being able to evolve them.

And last time I checked, the point of learning is not to affirm what you already believe, it’s to evolve what you believe. And so if I put a thought out there, I want to separate that from my identity. What I think is not who I am. What I value is who I am. And I think this is a distinction that a lot of people overlook.

So beliefs are what you think is true. Values are what you think is important. So if we take this emotion regulation topic, I have a belief based on a lot of social science, that there’s a particular effective set of strategies for regulating emotions. And one of those is to hold people responsible for their actions, not the emotions they cause in you. Those emotions are on you.

But I’m completely open to changing my mind on that in light of better evidence, because my identity is anchored in the value of being someone who learns from data and someone who tries to use the tools of psychology to help people live better lives. And so if that turns out to be wrong, it’s not a threat to my sense of self. It’s a moment of discovery. And that moment of discovery, after I get over the “I feel like an idiot” and “I shouldn’t have framed that post that way” and “I should have clarified the context”—is this was a great moment of learning for me.

Experience as Data

DR RANGAN CHATTERJEE: Yeah, you mentioned there that you’re open to learning from data, but data comes in many forms. I am incredibly interested in science and what the new research is telling us, but I’m also very interested, if not more interested, in what I’ve actually seen work in real life with patients who are struggling.

And there’s something in your book where you write about confidence and you say that confidence is the result of progress, not the cause of it. And I underlined it. It caused me to pause and think. I completely agree with you. First of all, I think we’re often waiting, aren’t we, for confidence to get started, whereas you’re saying, hey, the opposite is actually true.

But if we play that out, based on what you just said, you’re open to changing your mind based upon data. I also believe that one of the most powerful forms of data for ourselves is experience. So on an individual level, if we have actually done something, felt differently and changed, I think that is one of the most powerful forms of data we can use. Do you have a perspective on that? And in particular, I guess I’m talking about experience, individual experience versus research evidence.

Balancing Research and Personal Experience

ADAM GRANT: I always want to know what happens when you triangulate across the two. So I think what research evidence often tells us is what works on average, for many of the people much of the time. But we rarely—I mean, you could talk about this in personalized medicine. I think about this in the domain of how often we ignore personality traits.

When we run experiments in psychology, there are huge individual differences that are going to matter. And so the evidence is never going to tell you exactly what works for you. And so you want to juxtapose what does science tell you with what does my experience tell me?

And I think where there are gaps, it doesn’t mean that the science is wrong. Sometimes it means you’re an outlier in the data or that your particular profile of traits wasn’t well represented in the samples that have been studied so far. And so I see this all the time when I share studies. People are saying, “Well, that’s not what my experience has shown.” I’m saying, “Maybe you’re an exception to the trend.” That’s okay. That doesn’t mean the trend is wrong. It just means that the trend doesn’t capture all the variation. And I think that’s an important distinction to recognize.

I do worry a little bit about people over-indexing on their lived experience because often so many of our choices in our lives are small experiments. But we’ve never run the AB test. We’ve just implemented the A. And we assume that the A is working, but we don’t know whether we’re succeeding because of it or in spite of it if we haven’t tested alternatives.

And so, yeah, I guess I worry a little bit that through experience people form intuition. And once people have an intuition, they’re reluctant to question it. And sometimes they don’t even fully recognize the sources of it.

The Limits of Intuition

When I think about intuition, it’s basically subconscious pattern recognition. And we know that that subconscious pattern recognition is faster than if you were to try to do it consciously. That’s why gut feelings tend to appear so quickly in many situations.

We also know, though—this is from work that Danny Kahneman and Gary Klein did—we know that those intuitions are only accurate if you built them up in environments that are similar to the ones that you’re in now. In other words, the patterns you’ve detected in the past could actually lead you astray in the future if you’re in a very different context.

So you can see this, for example, in the Kahneman and Klein work. Firefighter intuition is remarkably accurate because there are only so many ways that a building can burn if you track the laws of physics and chemistry. And so over time, if you have years of experience trusting that experience, that gut feeling that you’re in a dangerous situation, you can rely on the fact that the patterns you’ve seen before have taught you to recognize, “Okay, I’ve got to run.”

If you’re a stockbroker, turns out intuition is notoriously unreliable because yesterday’s market conditions that you built up experience in are actually not diagnostic of the way that the market is going to work tomorrow. And so in those situations, if we’re in a dynamic, unstable, uncertain environment, or if we’re in a new, unfamiliar environment, instead of trusting your intuition and your experience, you want to test your intuition and question whether your past experience is relevant to the present.

And I think as long as you’re doing that, experience is a great teacher. I just don’t want people to learn the wrong lessons from the past and then regret choices that they make in the future.

The Power of Multiple Mentors

DR RANGAN CHATTERJEE: Adam, if we’re trying to reach our full potential in life, how important are mentors, and how do we choose the right mentor for us?

ADAM GRANT: Oh, I had so much fun writing about this. I felt like there needed to be a mentoring chapter in Hidden Potential, because I think it’s almost impossible to meet someone who hasn’t had the great fortune of having somebody in their life who saw more potential in them than they saw in themselves. And that being a major catalyst for growth.

I think the mistake that we often make with mentors is we think there has to be “the one and only.” I have to find the one person who I rely on for all the advice and guidance that I need. And the research suggests that this is not accurate, that people who have multiple mentors are more likely to advance and grow.

And this is in part because there’s no one person who is going to have all the expertise you need. It’s in part because very few people can find one person who will spend all the time with them that they need to fill the gaps in their knowledge and their skills.

But it’s also because I think that what good mentors end up doing is they walk you down their path. But that may or may not be the right path for you. And so when you have multiple mentors, you can start to make your own map, trying out the paths that several of them have taken. It really lifts the burden, too, of saying, “I don’t have to find someone and ask them to be my mentor. I can cobble together bits and pieces of advice from different people.”

Why the Best Experts Aren’t Always the Best Teachers

And I think the other mistake that a lot of people make is they want to go to the best expert or the biggest superstar because they think that person has all the knowledge. What they don’t realize is sometimes the best experts are the worst teachers because their knowledge is just too advanced. And they were either naturals to begin with, or they’re so far removed from where you are as a novice today that they don’t remember what it’s like to be in your shoes. And so they can’t give you good guidance. That’s well documented.

The other challenge that superstars run into is that when you go to the best expert, sometimes they have tacit knowledge that they don’t know how to make explicit. So if they do something naturally or they’ve done it with a lot of practice, it’s on autopilot. It’s second nature to them, and they can’t always explain what they’re expert at. Whereas somebody who’s one or two steps ahead of you and has just figured out this really complex skill is in the ideal position to unpack it with you.

DR RANGAN CHATTERJEE: I think that is such an important point, and you take a bit of time in the book to bust the myth that “those who can’t do, teach,” don’t you. And I really like that section because it’s, number one, it’s quite derogatory, secondly, it’s untrue.

And I was thinking about it through the lens of Tiger Woods. Now, I don’t know, first of all, that Tiger is a good teacher or not, but he has been trained by his father and other coaches since the age of two to be the very best golfer in the world. It is completely believable that now, in the middle of Tiger’s life, he may not remember what it’s like to duff a chip. He may just not be able to explain that anymore because it’s just ingrained within him.

But then let’s use Tiger as an analogy, because I think it works on multiple levels. Tiger Woods, when he has a golf coach, clearly, that golf coach is probably not as good as Tiger. But just because he can’t play as well as Tiger, it doesn’t mean he can’t offer incredible coaching to him. It’s a different skill set, isn’t it? Whereby it’s saying, “Hey, I can’t do what you can do, but I can observe you and I can see the patterns or whatever it might be.” So I don’t know if you think, for me, that really spoke to the idea you were talking about.

Expert Knowledge vs. Expert Performance

ADAM GRANT: It does. It speaks to it really well. There are two kinds of expertise. There’s expert knowledge and expert performance. And one is information you carry in your head that allows you to coach effectively. The other is something you can do with your mind and body that allows you to exercise a skill.

And the ability to do has no bearing on the ability to know and think and guide and advise. We saw this all the time in diving. One of the greatest coaches in Olympic history had never been a diver. And a lot of people would say—

DR RANGAN CHATTERJEE: What are you doing?

The Power of Teaching and Coaching

ADAM GRANT: You have no business doing it. You’ve never done it. Forgetting that you could study it, you could learn the laws of physics, you could coach, you could run experiments with your own divers, and then over time build up expertise in figuring out what helps people improve. I think that is true for any task. I think that, you know, instead of saying “those who can’t do, teach,” what we should say is “those who can do sometimes really struggle to teach.”

And can we take that a step further, please? I had so much fun writing about the tutor effect and the coach effect to say that, you know, the very situations where we turn to a coach or a mentor are actually the ones where we’re often better off coaching and teaching other people.

So in psychology, the tutor effect is the finding that when you set up a peer tutoring program or when there are multiple kids in a family, the tutor actually learns as much about the topic as the other student who’s being tutored. The older kid actually gets a benefit learning-wise from teaching younger siblings how to do stuff.

And I think we forget that when, you know, I think everybody’s heard the aphorism that the best way to learn something is to teach it. But we haven’t thought hard enough about the fact that you could actually learn things by teaching. Because when you have to explain something to someone else, when you have to guide them on how to do it better, you remember it better because you have to retrieve it and you understand it better as you’ve come up with analogies to try to make sense of it for them and take what’s intuitive in your mind and transfer it into theirs.

And so you can gain a lot of confidence by teaching. There’s also, I love this evidence that you can gain confidence by coaching, that instead of asking someone else for advice if you’re stuck, if you go to somebody who is stuck in a similar way and give them guidance, that’s actually more motivating because you realize I already have some of the knowledge I need.

The Flaw in Judging Expertise by Appearance

DR RANGAN CHATTERJEE: It’s so powerful. And where this often shows up in my world, Adam, is in the world of health. It’s well recognized now that the majority of what we see as doctors these days is in some way related to our collective modern lifestyles. Right. So I’m not putting blame on people. I get that life is tough and that, you know, it’s difficult to make the decisions that many people want to make for their health and well-being. But nonetheless, I think we have to acknowledge that modern life is making many of us sick.

And what you will often see online is people saying, “I’m not going to take advice from that doctor. He or she can’t even look after themselves.” And you know, if, let’s say a doctor is carrying excess weight, I’ve seen quite a lot of people jump on this bandwagon online saying, “Well, what do they know about it? I’m going to take advice from a doctor who looks fit and well.”

I get where that’s coming from. I really do. I understand that people feel sometimes, well, I’m going to listen to someone who looks fit and well rather than someone who doesn’t. But the problem is there’s a fatal flaw with that argument because someone who’s fit and well, for example, could effortlessly be fit and well. They may never have struggled with food cravings or struggled with their weight. So they may have no idea what you’re going through when you are struggling. Right.

So maybe it’s someone who actually, maybe a doctor or healthcare professional who has struggled with depression or has struggled with food cravings or has struggled with excess body fat. Well, maybe some of the time they’re perfect because they can understand what you’re going through. So again, I don’t think it’s the popular thing to say publicly. The popular thing to say is, you know, “I’m only going to take advice from someone who looks the way I want to look.” But I just think that logic is incredibly flawed.

ADAM GRANT: It is flawed. It’s absolutely flawed. I mean, you’re right. Everybody has different affordances and obstacles. And so whether they have a biogenetic disadvantage from just a pure physiological perspective, or whether they do in part to nature and in part nurtured, neither of which they had a lot of say in, they may struggle with certain character skills. You’re right. Those are the people who can often relate to you and your challenges and the person. I think this goes to the point about being a natural. If it came easy to you, you have not had to study it.

Daily Practices for Reaching Your Potential

DR RANGAN CHATTERJEE: Yeah. Adam, when you think about reaching your potential, are there things that you do on a daily basis that helps you, you know, connect with that? Do you have these, I guess, daily practices and rituals that you feel help you to get to know yourself better, which in turn is going to help you reach your targets, whatever those targets may be?

ADAM GRANT: I have. I have one practice that’s become daily. I should say, in general, I’m a little bit of a skeptic and maybe annoyingly contrarian on, I can’t stand the morning routines that, you know, that people recommend. I’m like, you know, you have to wake up at 4:30 a.m. and then go for a run, and then you eat breakfast. I’m like, don’t follow somebody else’s schedule. Anybody I know who has achieved anything meaningful, you know, they wake up and work when it works for them.

And that’s, to your point about testing out people’s recommendations through experience, I will say there’s something I have made a habit that was not intuitive to me, that I learned from the research, which is, I think we all know we need feedback to grow. And I want to keep getting better every day. And I know I have blind spots, and I need other people to hold up a mirror and not only be my judges, but my coaches.

And as you know, from Hidden Potential, when I started asking for feedback, when I wanted to get better as a public speaker, I did not get a lot of useful comments. I had a lot of cheerleaders who were just applauding my best self. And that did not help me grow very much. Just saying, “Yeah, that was great.”

I also had a lot of critics who would attack my worst self, and that was extremely demoralizing, especially the day when I was told “I gained nothing from this session. But I trust the instructor got useful insight.” That was a brutal comment to read. Thank you to that Air Force colonel.

Asking for Advice Instead of Feedback

But what I wanted to do was turn my cheerleaders and critics into my coaches and I really couldn’t figure it out for a while until I read the evidence suggesting that instead of feedback, I should ask for advice. When you ask for feedback, people look to the past and they might tell you what you did right, they might tell you what you did wrong. It’s not always clear how you can put that information into practice.

And when we go to the past, we often shame ourselves and beat ourselves up for our past mistakes and forgetting that the whole point of reviewing your mistakes is not to shame your past self, it’s to educate your future self to do that. If instead you ask people for advice, they tell you what you can do better next time, their advice tends to be more actionable. It’s easier to put into practice. It focuses your attention on tomorrow as opposed to ruminating about today or yesterday.

So my daily practice is every time I do anything that matters to me, at the end, I ask. Actually, I like to ask for a 0 to 10 score. And sometimes people comply and sometimes they don’t. But that’s actually helpful for me to calibrate. At the end of this conversation, if you give me a seven and a half, I’ll know that the comments that you give afterward are more tweaks. Whereas if you give me a four, wow, I need to go back to the drawing board and radically rethink the way I prepare for a podcast.

But then what I want to know is, what suggestions do you have for me next time? What advice do you have for next time I go on a podcast? And I try to ask every person I interact with for one piece of advice.

Now, I’m not just going to be a sponge in the sense of absorbing all that. I want to be a sponge in the sense of also having a finely tuned filter to weed out what might be sort of harmful particles or in this case, you know, criticism that’s coming from someone who’s not knowledgeable about me or the task or isn’t trying to help me.

Distinguishing Quality from Taste

So what I do is I try to ask a lot of people for advice on the same performance or the same task. It’s why when I write a book chapter, I’ve got 8 or 10 people reading, not 2 or 3. It’s why after I give a speech, I will ask a dozen people that I run into afterward “What’s the one thing I could do better?” Because what I’m trying to do is I’m trying to distinguish between quality and taste.

And if I just ask one person, I don’t know whether the thing they’re telling me is just their idiosyncratic opinion or whether there is an objective quality control issue that I’ve got to work on. Now, if five different people independently raise the same point, I know I’ve got to pay attention to that. And if somebody feels really strongly about something but no one else brings it up, that’s probably more, “All right, that’s their subjective reaction,” but is not necessarily something that everybody agrees is important. And I might focus on it less.

So that’s my daily practice. Ask for advice. What’s the one thing I can do better? And then triangulate across a bunch of people’s reactions and focus on the consistent suggestions.

DR RANGAN CHATTERJEE: Yeah, I love that. That’s a great bit of wisdom right there. I think that many of us can take and apply.

ADAM GRANT: Try it at your own risk. Yeah.

Final Words of Wisdom

DR RANGAN CHATTERJEE: And, Adam, I’ve got to be honest. I think you’re just writing killer book after killer book. This latest one, Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things, I think is just wonderful. And I think it’s going to help all of us become a better version of ourselves, whatever that means for us. So thank you for writing it.

To finish off our conversation, which I’ve really enjoyed, for that person who is getting the realization throughout this conversation that they’re a bit stuck and that they’re at a stage of life where they’ve not realized their full potential, do you have any final words of wisdom for them?

ADAM GRANT: Well, first, let me just say thank you for the kind words. It’s an honor to have a chance to share ideas, and I really admire the thoughtfulness with which you engage ideas, even ideas you disagree with, and encourage people to be more curious and more compassionate. I think that speaks volumes about your character, both your values and your skills in the character realm.

I think in terms of if you’ve recognized that you have hidden potential and you feel stuck, I think I would say two things. The first one is listen to the advice you give to others. It’s usually the advice you need to take for yourself.

And the second one is probably the chapter I learned the most from writing in Hidden Potential was the chapter on how we often need to move backward in order to go forward. When I get stuck, I feel like I just need to push harder. And the last thing I would ever want to do is go back to the drawing board, because it feels like I’m giving up all the gains I’ve made. And I don’t want to admit defeat. I don’t want to regress or reverse.

But sometimes you actually have to retreat back down the mountain in order to find a better route up it or in order to find the momentum to make the climb. And I would say, you know, if you are stuck, don’t be afraid of hitting the reset button and backing up to move forward.

I think, you know, I see this a lot in careers, and I find myself telling people, “Listen, I know you’ve already invested six years in this field. You went to school, you’ve—”

DR RANGAN CHATTERJEE: Worked your way up.

ADAM GRANT: It feels like a big risk to start over, but I would rather admit that you wasted the last few years than see you waste the next 20 or 30.

DR RANGAN CHATTERJEE: Adam, it’s been an absolute joy getting the chance to talk and discuss these ideas with you. Thank you so much for making time to come on the show.

ADAM GRANT: Thank you for having me. And I’m ready for your 0 to 10 rating and your suggestion for what I can do better. Are you up for it?

DR RANGAN CHATTERJEE: Yeah. What, you mean right now?

ADAM GRANT: Yeah. Or we can do it offline if you prefer, but I’m happy to do it live.

DR RANGAN CHATTERJEE: Okay. We could try it live. So this is on your performance on the podcast. Wow. Giving the infamous Adam Grant feedback on his performance on the podcast. I don’t feel qualified to give you feedback, but 0 to 10 rating, you’ve—

ADAM GRANT: Done 400 of these, Rangan. I think you’re well qualified, honestly.

The Beauty of Imperfection

DR RANGAN CHATTERJEE: And I’m not just saying this, you’re clearly a very eloquent speaker and you have a really awesome way of articulating your ideas. So I would give that a nine. I thought you were wonderful. You know, you didn’t know where I was going to go. I went into all kinds of different directions. So you beautifully followed me on all of those things.

What could you do better? I honestly, I don’t know if this is the right way to answer this, Adam, but for me, and this is my way of trying to give you the answer. As a recovering perfectionist, podcasting has taught me a lot. Podcasting has taught me particularly long form podcasting. So unscripted. These are authentic conversations that go where they’re going to go.

I’ve learned that there’s no such thing as a perfect conversation. It doesn’t exist. Had I gone to bed early last night and not played table tennis, I think this would have been a different conversation. Had we had this conversation in the afternoon your time, rather than the morning your time, I think it would have been a different conversation because we would be a different person at each of those time periods.

So what you’re asking me is almost the opposite of where I’ve tried to get to with this podcast, which is to embrace the conversation for what it is and realizing that actually what it was is all it could ever have been. Because we brought ourselves both to this interaction. And just as if I’m meeting a friend for a drink somewhere, I don’t really assess that afterwards and go, you know, how were you with your buddy today? Was that a 10? Was that an 8? Was that a 7? You know, no, it was what it was. And so this is a long winded way of saying I wouldn’t change a thing.

ADAM GRANT: Wow. That, you know, you’re really forcing me to embrace this idea of imperfection and in particular the wabi sabi idea of the beauty and imperfection. I think you’re right. I think, yeah, this is something I need to internalize more. Maybe there are certain things that I don’t need to always ask, how could I do better?

Turning the Tables

DR RANGAN CHATTERJEE: Before you take off, then I have to put it to you, what can I do better?

ADAM GRANT: I would actually say that some of my favorite parts of this conversation were where instead of you jumping to the next question on topics that you were excited to talk about, you reacted and shared your personal experience, in some cases as a clinician, in other cases as a person. And I think that’s where an interview becomes a conversation.

I think that’s where your audience relates to you. You’re in some ways a stand in for the listener. And so when you react, that’s you sort of capturing, hey, I felt this way too. And I think I would encourage you to do more of that.

DR RANGAN CHATTERJEE: Adam, I very much appreciate the feedback from yourself.

ADAM GRANT: It’s not feedback, it’s just advice. And you should ask a bunch of people and see if they agree with it or not. And maybe for listeners and viewers, tell us if you agree.

DR RANGAN CHATTERJEE: Yeah, well, I’m going to ask my wife to keep this in. She produces the show. Keep things. I think it’ll be fun for people. So, Adam, listen, it’s been great. I hope we get a chance to do a part two at some point in the future. But in the meantime, thank you very much for coming on the show.

ADAM GRANT: Pleasure was all mine. Thank you for having me. Loved it.

DR RANGAN CHATTERJEE: If you enjoyed that, I think you are really going to enjoy this conversation about the seven signs that you may be on the road to burnout and what you can do about it. One of the worst things in life is when you’ve got no energy. Every day feels like you’re on a treadmill. I’ve been a medical doctor now for over 21 years, and this is one of the commonest complaints I see people.

Related Posts

• On Purpose Podcast: with Priyanka Chopra Jonas (Transcript)
• TRIGGERnometry: w/ Freya India – How the Internet Ruins Young People (Transcript)
• Diary Of A CEO: w/ Divorce Lawyer James Sexton (Transcript)
• On Purpose Podcast: w/ Relationship Coach Matthew Hussey (Transcript)
• On Purpose Podcast: w/ Sabrina Zohar on Modern Dating (Transcript)