Good Life Project - Adam Grant: What It Takes to Be An Original (and why you care)

Episode Date: February 22, 2016

Originals are the non-conformists who drive creativity and change forward—the ones who help us progress as both independent cultures and a unified species. They're Steve Jobs' "crazy ones."Yet in spite of this, humanity has always had a fascinatingly dysfunctional relationship with originality—we simultaneously venerate and scorn it, particularly in the workplace. Originals may eventually come to be loved, but they’re almost always met with cynicism and resistance first. Because they don't fit in.It’s a fascinating duality, and it’s one of the many things we discuss with today’s guest, Adam Grant—author of two New York Times bestselling books (Originals, Give and Take), and—at 34—the youngest tenured professor in the history of the Wharton School.As Grant shares, thanks to shifts in social and cultural norms, it’s never been easier to be an original, but so many of us still resist the call. In this wide-ranging conversation, we go deep into how originals think and act.We explore how we're often the worst judges of our own good ideas and what do to about it. We debunk the myth of the need to go "all in" and share how the founders of Warby Parker, one of the most innovative companies in the world, kept their days jobs.We talk about our almost inherent willingness to underestimate ourselves and our creative capacities and what to do about it, and the importance of creating a vast volume of work in order to become an original. We dive into what happens when you try to exert power, before you have status and how that effects your ability to create change. And, so much more.Join us as we dive headlong into originality—how it works, how it’s changed the world we live in, and why more of us need to embrace it. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. People who keep their day jobs and start a company on the side as a hobby are 33% less likely to fail than people who quit their jobs and go all in because it seems that they buy themselves the time to really get the idea right and tinker and iterate as opposed to feeling pressure to rush a product to market. This week's guest, Adam Grant, has been recognized as Wharton's top-rated teacher for a number of years and one of the most influential management thinkers in the world. But what we're talking about isn't really management today.

We're talking about being original. He's also the author of one of my favorite books, Give and Take, and he's got a new book called The Originals, which really dives into this question of what does it actually take to be original? What does it take to actually change the world? What does it take to actually not just go along, but be nonconformist on a radical level and actually make a difference? There's some really surprising science that Adam has explored and uncovered and research that defies a lot of popular mythology and conventional wisdom. Really fun conversation. And if you're somebody who really is looking to make a mark and to try

to do something different, unique, then this is a conversation you absolutely do not want to miss. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. Really fascinating book. It's been fun to kind of watch your exploration. You know, when I think about the word originals, all sorts of different fantasy scenarios come to mind and iconic people. I'm curious for you, when you talk about originals, what do you actually mean when you use that word? And what was it that really led you to become so interested in studying what makes people that thing? When I think of originals, I think about nonconformists, people who look at the world around them and ask,

could it be better? Is there a way that I can improve it? So originals, I guess, end up being people who speak out and stand up for their ideas and their values. And they drive a lot of the creativity and change in the world. That's what got me really excited about them. There's all this evidence that organizations have a hard time tolerating original thought and that they tend to sort of stamp out nonconformity. And yet we have all these people with great ideas. And I wanted to know how we could help individuals speak up more effectively and champion new ideas and how we could create organizations, schools, even families where people were comfortable bringing their original ideas to the table. Yeah. Do you think it's gotten any easier over the last generation or so for originals to stand

out? Do you think it's gotten easier or harder, or is it pretty much the same as it's always been? It's interesting. I think it's gotten easier in a lot of places. We see more companies with flat hierarchies than we used to in the past. So in Silicon Valley, for example, you're sort of expected to be original. And I guess you could say that nonconformity is the new conformity there. But I think that in a lot of places, organizations are still dominated by fear and futility. And people don't speak up because either they think they're going to get punished for it, or they just don't really believe that anyone's going to listen. Yeah. I mean, it's interesting because the culture of entrepreneurship has really exploded.

And we've got the phrase startup, which 20 years ago wasn't really a phrase, you know, you were either an entrepreneur, or you were a business owner, or you worked for an come into existence to describe that state where you're not actually, it's like a permission giving phrase where it's not about having to succeed. It's like, I'm in a state where my job is to take risks, and my core metric is of learning, not necessarily success. And it's almost like, you know, I wonder if that might start to trickle out from Silicon Valley a bit into that. Or have you seen that trickle out at all? Well, I hope it does. One of the things I heard consistently from Silicon Valley founders, Larry Page, Elon Musk, others that are similarly original, is they said, look, you know, when I was in startup phase, I was afraid of failing, just like everybody is. But I was even more afraid of failing to try. And I think that one of the great things about this startup mentality is that it really shifts how people think about regret.

Most people, when they consider doing something original, they worry about looking stupid or embarrassing themselves. But in the long run, the biggest regrets that we have are the chances that we didn't take. It's the inactions, not the actions that we wish we could do over. And I think if we could spread that startup mindset outside of Silicon Valley, we'd see more people saying, you know, the biggest risk is not taking a risk.

Yeah, it's funny that you mentioned that also, because that's sort of, you know, the thing about regrets is it's become really popular wisdom in sort of the self-help personal development world. But there's research around that too, isn't there? Yeah, there is. If you look at the studies on regret, most people actually think that they're going to regret the errors of commission in the moment. But when you follow up with them over time, that reverses and it's the errors of omission that they feel this remorse about saying, you know, I should have started a company.

I should have spoken up about this idea. I shouldn't have let somebody talk me into doing something that just seems safe, even though I wasn't passionate about it. So talking about errors of omission, one of the things that you share is, what I guess maybe you would label your worst financial decision of your life. Yeah, thanks for that.

Well, you know, it's got context in the conversation. So take me into what you mean by that. Yeah. So seven years ago, I was teaching my first class at Wharton. And the student, Neil, came to me and said, I'm starting a company with three friends. Do you want to invest in it? And I took a look at what they were up to. They hadn't dropped out of school. Almost all of them had worked in internships over the summer instead of focusing on the business. They had lined up all of them, backup jobs, just in case their startup didn't work out. And the day before the company launched, it's an online business. They still don't have a functioning website. The whole business is a website. That's literally all it is. And I just looked at that and said,

they are not serious. And they ended up selling glasses online and naming the company Warby Parker. They were just named the world's most innovative company and valued at over a billion dollars. And now my wife handles all of our investments. So, I mean, what was going on beneath the surface here, though? Well, I think the thing that I learned most was that a lot of originals look just like you and me. They feel these fears and doubts. They just learn how to harness them as a resource instead of being paralyzed by them. They hate taking risks. So I thought that to be a great entrepreneur or any kind of original, you had to be a daredevil. But in fact, if you look

at the research on this, people who keep their day jobs and start a company on the side as a hobby are 33% less likely to fail than people who quit their jobs and go all in. Because it seems that they buy themselves the time to really get the idea right and tinker and iterate as opposed to feeling pressure to rush a product to market. And that's exactly what the Warby Parker founders did. They spent months and months figuring out, okay, we're going to build a brand here. It's going to be a retail and fashion brand.

And that means we need a company name that's sophisticated, unique, has no negative associations. They spent those six months where they weren't getting the company off the ground testing over 2000 brand names until they finally found one that worked. Yeah. And it's amazing because it really does go against all the mythology. And I guess that was the same mythology that kind of led you to say, well, if you're going to do something like this, it's got to be a hundred percent, you know, 110% of your waking and probably sleeping hours, you've got to be all in. And so it's kind of be 100%, you know, 110% of your waking and probably sleeping hours. You've got to be all

in. And so it's kind of fascinating to see that actually the sign supports the fact that you're more likely to succeed if you actually keep your day job for a while. Yeah, I certainly didn't expect that. And, you know, I think that there, I mean, there are all these great examples of people who have done that. And we tend to leave that part out of the story, right? So even with somebody like Bill Gates, you know, the heroic version of the story is he drops out of the story. Even with somebody like Bill Gates, the heroic version of the story is he drops out of college and goes for broke to start Microsoft. We don't mention the part where he takes a leave of absence. He doesn't drop out just in case he wants to come back. He has financial support from his parents, and he has a year of software sales under his belt,

knowing that there's already interest in his product. So, you know, I think if we tell the full story there, a lot of the great entrepreneurs and originals in the world don't look quite as crazy as they seem on the face. It almost flies in the face, I think, of the story that we want to believe, because I think sometimes, I wonder if sometimes we tell that story because, you know, we're in a place where we're just not happy with what we're doing. And we want, we want permission to be able to tell the world, like, I have to go all in to make this happen rather than kind of sticking it out or riding it out longer and just kind of dealing with it and building this thing on the

side. It's kind of like, we want to validate the myth because, you know, if we say that's what it takes to make it, then, you know, it's sort of like gives us permission to go and do that. That's fascinating, Jonathan. I've never thought about it that way. And it makes me wonder if that permission comes from believing that other people took just almost unreasonable risks. And that makes it easier for us to take small ones. Yeah. I mean, I think it does to a large extent. It's funny.

If you had asked me maybe five years ago, should driver, person, go all in, I would have said yes. There's a fascinating book called Daily Rituals. I don't know if you've ever read it. I have, yeah. Yeah. So one of the things that blew me away about that book was the number of, and so this is for those who don't know, it's a book that basically looks at, I guess what you would call original, some world-class artists, creators, writers, scientists, and looks at what's 24 hours in their day. And one of the things that really surprised me about that was the fact that there was a much larger percentage of them who kept their day jobs and had no intention of ever

leaving them because like you said, it actually gave them the freedom to do this thing in the way and on the level that they want and take the risks knowing that, you know, their family was okay. Yeah, that really seems to be the norm rather than the exception, right? So you, you know, everyone from Sarah Blakely with Spanx to Marcus Person with Minecraft, Larry and Sergey at Google. I mean, the list is a mile long of people who spent months or even years sticking to their full time commitments and, you know, just doing these ideas on the side, sometimes not walking away from their day jobs or their schools, even after they had seen signals of success. I love that because it's, I think it's freeing for people. I think it's freeing for people also if you feel like they want to take those steps a little bit later in life where they're not actually willing to abandon some sense of security because they feel like, hey, I've got a family, I've got responsibilities. So it kind of says, you know, there is a way to actually honor both sides of yourself.

I like the sound of that. One of the things that you explore also, which I thought was fascinating, was how awful we are at judging the validity of our own ideas and how it's not just us, but it's also the people that we often look to to validate them, the people we think are really smart are generally pretty bad about that also.

Take me into this a little bit. Yeah, I mean, my favorite study of this is by Justin Berg, a Stanford professor who looked at circus artists. So he asked them to submit videos of their performances, like for Cirque du Soleil. So you had jugglers, acrobats, clowns. Everyone hates clowns, by the way. But the other performances, they had potential.

And he gave the videos to over 13,000 audience members and asked them to rate how much they liked them. They had a chance to share them on social media. And they also were able to donate some of their own money to support the performers, which was a nice way to indicate would they pay to see these people perform. And then he asked people to judge how likely their own performances were to succeed. And they way overestimated their own acts. Circus artists thought that their acts were really special. And most of the time, they were too enthusiastic. And you see the same thing with entrepreneurs, that they believe they're far more likely to succeed than somebody with a similar background and set of skills. And otherwise, they wouldn't

try. But it's really hard to judge your own ideas. It's so easy to fall in love with them and see all the reasons that they're going to work, confirmation know, sort of looking for reasons that it's going to succeed and ignoring all of the signs that it might fail is pretty pervasive there. And so we think, well, maybe I should go to managers. They're the gatekeepers. They're the people who know which ideas will take off and which ones won't. And yet the middle managers in the circus study were almost as bad as the performers themselves for the opposite reason. They committed all these false negatives. They took a new performance and the more novel it was, the more they said, this doesn't look like acts that have succeeded in the past. And so they shot it down. And I think that raises the question of who do you go to?

And I'm really curious about the false negatives also. It was interesting when I was actually working on my last book, it was all about how we handle uncertainty in the creative process. And, you know, one of the first things I stumbled upon was the Ellsberg paradox. But then there was follow on research that and so the Ellsberg paradox is basically if you're faced with an uncertain option, we tend to, we run towards certainty, even if there's no rational basis for it, right? So just for those listening who may not be familiar with it.

So what's interesting is there's a follow-on study done that actually showed that if you told the people that their choice of a certain or an uncertain option would never have to be revealed, the bias away from uncertainty was essentially evaporated. So I wonder how much of that is based in sort of social context. I think there has to be a big part of it. I think, though, that it's not just about how you're perceived by others here. There's also having to reconcile with the person in the mirror. And a lot of people have a very hard time coming to terms with the possibility that their ideas aren't good. And I guess in the case of managers, though, the story fits really nicely

because a lot of managers would say, look, if this is a new idea, by definition, the more novel it is, the more uncertain it is because it's hard to use the past then to predict the future. And if that's the case, it's easy to imagine all the reasons that this would fail and just say it's better not to take the risk and I can justify betting on an act that has a track record of 10 others like it that did pretty well.

But it's amazing on the positivity side of being overly in love with your own ideas. We even see this among great originals. Beethoven's one of my favorite examples. He was known as a really perceptive self-critic. And yet there's a study of the letters he wrote evaluating 70 of his own compositions. And it turned out that of the 70, he had 15 false positives, where he thought pieces were going to be big hits that critics didn't love, and eight false negatives, where he said, yeah, this isn't very good, and they ended up becoming great. So if Beethoven was off the mark, we probably all are. Yeah. And like you said, we see this in the world of business also all the time, which, you know,

you'd think, you know, there's the term smart money, right? You know, it's like the top VCs in the world and they're great at picking. But in fact, the smartest money, the smartest investors in the world, they're very often wrong a lot more often than they're right. Yeah, I think they have to be. And I think one of the mistakes that a lot of investors make is they approach new ideas in an evaluative mindset. And they're looking for all the reasons not to bet on whatever the idea is on the table. And if you go back to the circus study, there was one group of people who were good at predicting which novel acts would take off with audiences.

And that was peers, fellow performers. And unlike the artists themselves, the people who are performing with you have enough distance to tell you when your work is garbage. But unlike the middle managers, they were much more likely to experience the act as opposed to evaluating it. And they really looked for signs of potential in it or were willing to take a risk on something untried. And it would be great if we had more investors think that way. And there's an easy way to do it, which is Justin found in a follow-up study that you could get managers to be more open to novel ideas

just by having them brainstorm for five minutes about their own ideas before they evaluated other people's ideas. And that kind of put them in a creative mindset. Yeah, which I found really fascinating. Um, you wonder why that type of thing isn't sort of, you know, it hasn't become just common practice given the crazy call, the constant call for, we need new ideas. We need new ideas. You know, if that's true. And if part of the problem is validating new ideas or is not just the generation side, but the evaluation, like, is this legit?

Then maybe I'm making an assumption. You're much more engaged in that space than I am. Have you seen simple techniques like this sort of pervading the culture on any meaningful level that would start to really sort of open people up to getting better evaluations of what's legitimately groundbreaking and what's not? Not yet, but I hope it will start to happen soon. I think that we've been obsessed when we think about originality and creativity, as you said, with the idea generation part and wanting to know, you know, what does it take to have people come up with more ideas, better ideas? And I don't think that's why we're lacking originality in the world. I think it's much more of an idea selection problem that people are constantly betting on the wrong ideas and committing these false positives and false negatives.

And I think there's growing recognition, right? That as you see, Mark Cuban said his biggest mistake was passing on Uber. Everyone loves the story of NBC almost leaving Seinfeld on the cutting room floor, or lots of publishers rejecting Harry Potter because it was too long for a children's book. If anything, I wanted that series to be longer, right? So who cares? But I think there's growing recognition that idea selection is a big problem. And I'd love to see more investors start to take a closer look at what are the effective habits for judging whether an idea is going to take off. Yeah, I wonder if just part of the mentality in creative or investment work and pretty much anything is that you kind of know that forever, and this is what I've heard around the world of

tech entrepreneurship especially, is that if a VC invests in 10 companies, they know five are going to flop, three are going to do decently, one's going to do really well, and one will be a home run. And they just kind of accept that as that's the way it is. And I almost wonder if there's this mentality of there's really nothing to be done on that side. I think it's really cool to think that actually there could be a tremendous amount of work to be done on that side.

Yeah, I think a lot of people see how much uncertainty and randomness there is in the process. And they say, look, it's like being a baseball player. You can bat 300 if you become skilled, but you're never going to bat 600. And I'm not convinced that that's true. I think that there's a lot of signal in the noise. I think that very rarely have investors or frankly, anyone who takes a look at ideas had a large enough data set to say, you know, let's track all of our false positives and false negatives, and let's figure out what those have in common, and whether some people are better forecasters than others, and then sort of train the trainer with that knowledge. Yeah, no, I love that. And one of the things that we haven't touched on,

but I think it's part of this process also, and I know you actually you write about is the idea of is the place of volume in creating highly original work. You know, we love to have this idea also of the, you know, just like the creative genius who were everything, they reach a point where they're just at a level of mastery where everything they create is extraordinary, but that's not the reality on the ground. No, the Midas touch is such a myth. You see this across every domain where you can study creative geniuses. So Shakespeare, you know, you remember him for Hamlet or Macbeth, but he did 37 plays.

Nobody reads Timon of Athens or The Merry Wives of Windsor. And the critics who do say, you know, it's hard to even believe this was Shakespeare's work. The prose wasn't polished. The plot, you know, doesn't quite resolve itself. The characters were sort of underdeveloped. You look at music and you ask, what made Mozart, Beethoven, and Bach different from their peers? And what you see is their hit rates were not necessarily better than other great composers. They just churned out more work. Mozart had more than 600 pieces, Bach had over a thousand. And they had to generate that much variety and that much volume in order to reach something

truly original. My favorite example, though, is Edison, who designed a talking doll so creepy that it scared not only children, but adults too. And it was right around the time that he was working on the light bulb. He was also trying to use magnets to mine iron ore. Didn't work. Trying to come up with a novel fruit preservation technique, failed miserably. And over time, the people who are the greatest originals are the ones who failed the most

because they were the ones who tried the most. Yeah, I love that. It's funny too, I was actually recently having a conversation with a friend of mine who's a professional photographer. And he's been doing it long enough to sort of been through the transition of film to digital. And it's really interesting because back when there was, when you were shooting on film, you're much more miserly about

what you're shooting. You know, you don't just sit there and click off thousands of shots because it's going to cost you a boatload of money to actually do that. So there was a sense that you had to really, really invest yourself more in each shot because each shot actually had a tangible cost, like a dollar cost. Whereas now, you know, you're in a studio, everything is digital. It goes straight to the screen. There isn't that same sense of cost. So there's like this willingness to actually play much more of a volume game and capture a lot more. So you may take a thousand shots and end up with three that you really love.

The actual cost of investment is changing in an interesting way in certain fields too. Yeah, I think that's a good thing for everyone involved. Because it does mean we get to try greater diversity of ideas. I think though that unfortunately, a lot of idea generators don't quite get this. And they either fall in love with their first few ideas, or they generate a couple ideas and they think they're out of steam. And you have to push past that point. There was a series of studies that came out not long ago showing that people underestimated

how many creative ideas they had at their disposal. Their first 15 ideas were less original than their next 20 because the early ideas you think of are often the most conventional and easy to conjure up. And they kind of gave up after that first 15 and they said, I don't really have anything left. And when the psychologists who did the study pushed them a little bit and said, you've got five, 10 more minutes, you can probably come up with a few more ideas. They were able to double their output and their originality went up too.

So I think that the moment where you think you've run out of ideas is often the moment when you're best poised to be original. Yeah, I love that. I can't remember where I read this. Maybe you have a better site for this from me. But there was one point where I read that sort of like the ideation process normally goes through three stages. One is sort of like all the obvious stuff that people throw out there. And it's like, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

And you think these are great ideas. But then once they're out there, you kind of realize, well, this is same old, same old. It's kind of garbage. And where you thought you were done, you're like, okay, let me push through. And that second level is where you start to get much more innovative stuff. But even then, a lot of times you look at that and you're like, no, we're not there yet. And that's where it gets gut-wrenching. You think you have absolutely nothing left inside of you. And it's those few people who actually push through to that phase three, where the truly innovative ideas come from.

I can't remember where I saw that. Have you seen any conversation or research around that idea? I haven't seen much research on that directly. So there's this paper I was talking about. It was a recent publication by Brian Lucas and Lauren Nordgren in Northwestern. And they touch on some of those themes. But it reminds me also of this great Ira Glass commentary on the gap, which you're familiar with, right? It's such a profound

observation that when you sit down to do something creative, you have a vision for what a brilliant new idea is going to look like. And you can't produce the vision when you start. And so there's this gap between where you want to end up and where you are now, and that's paralyzing to a lot of people. And I think that's where you go, that level one, level two, level three, that's about closing the gap and saying,

I'm going to lower my standards for what counts as progress and just churn out a bunch of work and separate the process of generating ideas from evaluating them. And that way, I hope I can generate enough content that there are a few diamonds in the rough. Yeah, I think, I mean, I actually love that whole conversation around I wrote, that was sort of the same thing we were talking about. You have the taste to know where you want to be, but you don't yet have the skills or the ability,

or what we're saying here is the iterations to be there yet. And I think it's so frustrating for so many people to say, well, I've got to wait, especially I wonder if these days, you know, we live in such a now culture, that the idea of having to iterate through hundreds, or maybe 1000s, and taking time to do that is just, you know, we have less tolerance for that than we've ever had before. We do. And this is something that I found really useful to rethink as a writer. I used to agonize over every sentence and get frustrated that they weren't right. And I literally now separate writing from editing. So as I'm writing, as I go, I won't go back and redo a single word or sentence. I'll come back to it a few days later or a few weeks later with

fresh eyes. But I really just want to focus on churning out ideas. Do you operate that way too? You know, it's so interesting. As you're saying that, I'm wondering, actually, I'm thinking, actually, I'm the opposite. I edit while I write. It's funny. I think it was Vonica who kind of separated people into two different types of writers. One was called Bashers, and I can't remember the other one.

And it was basically the people who they toil and they edit, but when they sort of pen the last word, it's 99% done. And then those who do exactly what you said, where it's just like everything goes on to the page. There's no editing. And then you take second and third and fourth and fifth passes. And that's where you edit. Yeah, I guess if you're a basher, he would have called me a swooper, right? Yeah, yeah, exactly. That's right.

That's what it was. So I'm more of a basher, but I've often thought about experimenting with the other almost just to see how it felt and how it worked And eventually I thought, when I speak, I don't do that. I'm just comfortable putting lots of ideas out there. And then I kind of edit later. Why shouldn't writing work the same way? And so I sat down and said, all right, I'm going to set a goal of, I've got an hour, I'm going to try to crank out a thousand words. And if even 10 of those are good, it'll be more productive than the last hour I spent. So I gave it a shot and found that it actually worked really well for me. So has it made a big difference in both the speed and the quality of your output, do you think?

Both. Yeah. I mean, there's no question there's a huge speed advantage. And as far as quality is concerned, I find it really hard to intertwine idea generation and idea evaluation because they're two very different exercises. The first is divergent. You're trying to think outside the box. You're trying to come up with new thoughts. And the second is convergent, where you have a very clear standard of what counts as good. And you're sort of rigorously evaluating everything you put out against that. And I guess for me, it's easiest to activate those two mindsets at different times. Yeah. You know, what's so interesting as you're saying that, especially when you

brought Convergent and Divergent up, when I look at, I'm a big fan of design thinking, I think it's, and I guess people implement that differently, but, you know, which is really, and you really do separate those two phases. So it's interesting that when I'm building product or come up with business ideas, I take that approach. But when I sit down to write, you know, a substantial piece of writing, I kind of throw that out the window. So it's making me really rethink how I'm going to do my next whatever project it is. I love it. I think that makes a ton of sense. Yeah.

One of the things that you talk about and you write about also is the idea of taking risks and speaking up. And the conversation I thought was really fascinating because you link that with trying to exert power when you haven't yet attained the status to exert it. Take me into that conversation a little bit. Yeah. A lot of times people confuse power and status, but they're two different things. Power is influence. It's about your position, your resources, your ability to get people to do things. Power is influence. It's about your position, your resources,

your ability to get people to do things. Status is respect. It's about whether people admire you, like you, appreciate you. And there's a bunch of research by Alison Fregale, which I think is really clever, showing that we really dislike people who try to exercise power without status. So people who wander around ordering others about what they should do without having sort of earned the right to do that. And this is especially a trap for members of minority groups. So if you're a racial minority, if you're a woman in a lot of organizations, people feel like you're being too assertive when you speak up,

and they code it as aggressive because of these unfair stereotypes that exist. And one of the ways to get around that is to try to earn status. And that means sometimes something as simple as doing your job well, and people say, all right, you're somebody who's dedicated. I'm going to listen to you. In other cases, it's showing that you care about the group's interests, and the suggestion you're bringing to the table is not about you. It's about trying to make this team better. And I think that oftentimes when people have an idea, the very emotions that

are required to get them to act, righteous indignation, anger, frustration, make them less thoughtful about when they should act and how they should speak up and they forget to earn status first. I mean, it's so frustrating also, I think, for so many people, because if you don't enter that conversation with some sort of sensibility around the social dynamic and the relationship between power and status, then you do, you're all fired up. And very often, it's those people who are new to an organization who have the least amount of status, who also have the larger, broader data set, you know, because they haven't already been indoctrinated. They haven't, you know, they don't know that

these are the rules. This is the way that we always work. They're coming from a different place. So you've got like this, you know, sort of collision of the person who may have the data set that really is able to see things differently, but you don't yet have anywhere near the status to be able to have your ideas taken seriously. And I think it's so frustrating for so many people. Frustrating and all too common. So what do you do about that? Yeah, I don't know. I just study this stuff. Good luck. No, I think one of the things you try to do is you earn what are called idiosyncrasy credits. So you see this especially in groups

where when somebody goes above and beyond or makes a valuable contribution, they earn license to deviate. It's one of the reasons that people are willing to tolerate a lot of Steve Jobs' antics, right? He had done something extremely valuable for Apple in part creating it. And I think that one of the big questions is, okay, in this place, what are the behaviors that are valued that would lead other people to say, you know, we wouldn't normally be open to this idea, but because this is somebody who's really done something original or generous around here, then we're going to give it some due consideration. And once you learn what kinds of behaviors get idiosyncrasy credits,

it's a lot easier to figure out what you need to do to earn status. Yeah. So basically, there's no single recipe. You got to kind of understand the social dynamic and the organization that you're in. But it's also those idiosyncratic behaviors. On the one hand, they can... Because I think there's probably a really thin line

between earning the credit you need to sort of leapfrog to have your ideas really considered and at the same time just really annoying people. Yeah, I mean, you go too far and you get seen as a brown noser and people are just irritated by you. And I think that means focusing on how do I contribute in ways that people will uniquely value? And I can do, but other people can't. And it's a lot less likely then that people start to get irked by it. Yeah, no, I love it. You also, there's a kind of funny example that I think was piggybacking off of this idea, which was that you wrote about the people who found Babel and something you called the

Sarek effect. And we're kind of like disarming people by saying the exact opposite thing that people thought was going to be said all of a sudden opened them in a way where the conversation probably would have never happened. Yeah, Rufus Griscom found this parenting website, Babbel, and he goes to investors. And as part of his pitch, he says, here are three reasons you should not invest in my company. And obviously, this is an attention-grabbing device in part because it's pretty unusual. But what happens is he walks away with over $3 million in funding that year. And he hears from investors that he came across as self-critical and honest. And there's

also some research to suggest that he made it harder for investors to think of their own objections. Because normally they're sitting there listening to a pitch and saying, here are the 12 things wrong with it. And they hear him name these big problems. And they're like, wow, this guy's pretty smart. He thought of the same things I did. And the funny thing is two years later, he goes to Disney to pitch that they should buy Babel. And he includes a slide that says, here are five reasons you should not buy Babel. And they end up buying it for $40 million. Not bad. Yeah. No, you gotta love it. It's funny. When I was reading you telling that story, a fictional scenario popped into my head with Eminem in the movie Eight Mile, where it's sort

of like the final rap battle scene. And he's like, okay, he basically does the exact same thing. He's like, okay, what's every potential diss that this person could throw at me? And let me just lay it all out there first and then drop the mic because there's, and it's so disarming. Then the other side is kind of like, well, I got nothing. Yeah. I mean, it's like, exactly. It deflates the entire attack and it turns it into a joint problem solving exercise almost where it's like exactly it deflates the entire attack and it turns into a joint problem solving exercise almost where it's like okay if you know as an investor i couldn't show you that i was smarter than you by thinking of objections that you didn't think of so instead i'm going to think of solutions you didn't think of and help you overcome the limitations of your business which i clearly want to invest in yeah that's too funny and it's like in effect instead of them

looking for what's wrong, they start to try and, like they're looking for reasons to convince themselves to do the opposite, actually invest. Exactly. Pretty brilliant, actually. Now, one of the other things that you explore, which I love because it kind of validates my MO,

and you also have written about this separately in articles, is the upside of, what do you call it? Strategic procrastination. Yeah. So this did not come to me easily. I'm the opposite of a procrastinator. I'm a pre-crastinator. And what that means is, you know that panic you feel when you're a couple hours before a deadline and you haven't even started? I feel that months in advance. And there's this tremendous sense of urgency to get things done ahead of schedule, to start them right away. And, you know, it's like progress for me is oxygen. And then I had this student, Jihei, who came to me and said she had her most creative

ideas when she was procrastinating. And I was like, that's cute. Where are the four papers you owe me? She was one of our most creative students. And as social scientists, this is what we do. We test these kinds of ideas. So I challenged her to go out and get some data. And she went into a couple of companies and she surveyed people on how often they procrastinate, got their bosses to rate their creativity. And sure enough, the procrastinators like me who did things ahead, they were rated as less creative than people moderately procrastinated. And so I asked her what happened to the chronic procrastinators who do it all the time. And she's like, I don't know,

they didn't fill out my survey. But no, they were less creative too because they ended up having to rush forward with the easiest idea instead of the most original one. But then we went into the lab and did some experiments to show that procrastination could cause creativity. And sure enough, what you see is when you delay the start or finish of a task,

you give yourself more time to incubate. And you're also more likely to do nonlinear thinking and, you know, make all these unexpected connections between ideas that you wouldn't have seen if you just had a, you know, a nice tidy plan at the start. And I think Aaron Sorkin put it best, the screenwriter, he said, you know, you call it procrastination. I call it thinking. Yeah. I love that. And it also describes a lot of my process. So I felt like vindicated. I'm the opposite of you. I guess I'm that moderate procrastinator, occasionally tending towards extreme. But I thought of it in the context of writing also, because it's the type of thing where

if somebody gives me a year to write a book, I won't start writing until very much the second half of that window. But if you ask me if I'm writing a book, I'll tell you, yeah, like, I'm actually in my mind. Yes, this is like, to me, they're, you know, writing it, there, there are two parts of it. One is the actual is, is the ideation is the, you day, as long as I'm taking in enough data to give the machine something to play with. And then by the time I actually sit down to write, that's just like pen to paper or fingers to a keyboard. It's the later part of a process, which is sort of like an honoring of the cultivation period and the value of that. But I guess as long as you don't go too far. Yeah. You know, Tim Urban, who writes the amazing Wait But Why blog, has a great statement about this. He says, look, you know, the way to get people to like your ideas is tell them that the bad habits they have are actually good for them. That's a little bit of what this procrastination thing does.

But it actually turns out, as you know, that Leonardo da Vinci, Martin Luther King Jr., Frank Lloyd Wright, Abraham Lincoln, Bill Clinton, Steve Jobs, all serious procrastinators. We're totally okay for them. And maybe, just maybe, some of their creative ideas came not in spite of procrastinating, but because of it. Yeah, and I know you wrote about how Martin Luther King Jr. Some of their creative ideas came not in spite of procrastinating, but because of it. were researching it, that actually the second half of that talk was improvised, that he kind

of was about nine minutes into it. And then he looked over at Mahalia Jackson, and he kind of was wondering, and he was noticing that it wasn't going over the way that he actually had hoped it was going to go over. And from that moment forward, the entire I Have a Dream speech was actually improvised, and that there were pieces of it that he'd been workshopping in different ways. But that wasn't actually the planned talk. Yeah, I had a lot of fun writing about this because one of the benefits of procrastinating is you allow yourself access to the most ideas and the biggest variety of ideas. But another benefit is your structure is not set in stone. The fact that King was up until at least 4 a.m.

working on that speech the night before the march on Washington. And in fact, he's sitting in the audience waiting for his turn to go on stage. He is still crossing out lines and scribbling notes. That left him more flexible and it made it easier to improvise. If he had memorized it months in advance, it would have been a lot harder to deviate, I think. Yeah, I love that. It's funny too, because as I know you do a lot harder to deviate, I think. Yeah, I love that. It's funny too, because as you know, I know you do a lot of speaking also, and I've had this ongoing

conversation with friends of mine who are, I'm not a circuit speaker, but I have friends where that's the entirety of their profession. And some of them are performers who will, you know, they'll, they'll meticulously craft a script and it'll take them months to refine it and then they'll spend months and months and months, a 100% memorizing it, embodying it and they get on stage and every step they take and every word they utter is 100% scripted and they feel that that is the only way to go. And I've always struggled with doing that, whereas I almost have the exact opposite approach. I go on stage with generally like five ideas or five stories. And then I kind of want to see what's happening in the faces of the people that I'm speaking with. I'm curious how, have you played

with this in when you, when you speak or when you present? Yeah. You know, I think there, there, there are two kinds of speeches that seem to work well. One is that where, you know, the words by heart so much that you can improvise it any second, because you'll never lose your place. And you always have a careful, clear structure to return to. The other is a speech where you know what you want to say, but not how you want to say it. And it's much less rehearsed. And you're actually thinking and conversing with the audience right there live. I think both can work really well. The benefit of the former is that it's going to be your best performance, right? It's where you're on, you hit all of your notes, you have your timing nailed. I think the benefit of the latter is it's more authentic, right? It

doesn't feel scripted and it feels like you created something unique for and with the audience. I just finished reading Chris Anderson's forthcoming book, TED Talks, where he finally shares after curating TED for the last 15 years, what makes a great TED Talk and how to give one. And he grapples with this idea that there are these two very different approaches and both can work for different people at different times. And just as an aside, I found the book profound. I think that it really changed the way that I think about not only the public speaking that I do, but the sentences that I utter. I can't wait to take a look at that.

Yeah, that's fascinating. One of the things that you also explore, and it's been a real fascination of mine too, is sort of the emotional toll that the process of taking risks, of being innovative, of being an original can take on you. And truth to probably on those around you and those close to you and those who care about you too. And going into the abyss to try and do something extraordinary can be brutal on a psychological level. And we're so often told things like think positive and try and be calm. And it was really interesting. You argue that sometimes actually doing the exact opposite is a better alternative, harnessing what you call defensive pessimism and actually not trying to be calm. Yeah. I think that a lot of people believe that optimists outperform pessimists. It's not

true. Think about when you were in school, this is the best way to see this. You're preparing for a big test. You've got about a week before it. And if you're an optimist, you will envision yourself acing this exam and that energizes you to study. If you're a defensive pessimist, you have a slightly different experience, which is you wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, imagining that not only are you going to fail this exam, but you're going to do so badly that your teacher is going to take away points on your previous exams. And you start to panic, and that anxiety motivates you to prepare. And you ace the exam.

You do just as well as the optimists, the data show. But you convince yourself next time that even though you've always done well, this time is different, and I'm really going to fail. And there's only one way to sabotage the performance of defensive pessimists, which is to make them happy. They literally perform worse when they're in a good mood because they get complacent and they don't feel the anxiety that normally motivates them to get ready.

And I think when you're preparing for something that's important, if you have any anxiety in advance, one of the best things you can do is not walk away from that anxiety or try to calm yourself down, but to embrace it and say, look, the reason I'm feeling anxious is because the outcome here is uncertain. I don't know whether I'm going to succeed or fail. And the more anxious I feel, the harder I'm going to work to prepare for success. And then by the end of it, when it's time to actually perform, you don't feel anxious anymore because you are totally ready. Yeah, I love that. I wonder how much of that also is just sort of is really individual.

But I don't want to get too far down that road with you. I know we have, we got to wrap up in the next minute or so or two. So I want to be super respectful of your time. Two final questions. One, so you're somebody that's been recognized as one of the top professors at Wharton, top innovator in the world. Do you consider yourself unoriginal? Oh, well, it's not my place to judge, is it, Jonathan? You know, look, I will say I've become less unoriginal over time. I used to conform a lot more than I do now. And I've become a lot more comfortable, you know, championing ideas that might be unpopular and speaking my mind when I believe in something. But you know, whether I

succeed in being original, I think is really in the eye of the beholder. And you'd have to evaluate it for yourself. All right, that's a politic answer. No, it's the truth, right? Like, you can't go around. It's like, when I wrote Give and Take, I had all these people saying, I'm a giver. And I was like, nope, you're a taker. Because you can't, these kinds of values, these moral values, you can't claim them for yourself, right? I guess what I'd say is I aspire to be an original. And those values are important to me. But you have to look at somebody's output and how it's judged by a whole community to find out whether it's truly original or not. Yeah. I think also, it's less about the label. It's more just about doing the work.

So last question, the name of this is Good Life Project. So if I offer that term out to you, to live a good life, what comes up? To live a good life to me means two things. One, it means leaving the world better than you found it. And that's all about introducing original ideas. And two, it means trying to help other people succeed, not just achieve your own success. And I think that that means, you know, giving more than you take. And I guess, you know, if you put those two pieces together, you know, being original and being generous, a good life is more about meaning for me than it is about happiness. It's about the impact you have, the legacy you create, the contributions you make, not just the joy that you find in everyday moments. Beautiful. Thank you.

Thank you. Hey, thanks so much for listening to today's episode. If you found something valuable, entertaining, engaging, or just plain fun, I'd be so appreciative if you take a couple extra seconds and share it. Maybe you want to email it to a friend. Maybe you want to share it around social media. Or even be awesome if you'd head over to iTunes and just give us a rating. Every little bit helps get the word out and it helps more people get in touch with the message. I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project. to push you. We know how life goes. New father, new routines, new locations. What matters is that you have something there to adapt with you, whether you need a challenge or rest. And Peloton has

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