In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen - Adam Grant: Give & Take, Think Again, and the Future of Work

Episode Date: August 23, 2023

How can you be generous without being taken advantage of? Why is it so difficult to change your mind? And what will the future of work look like?Adam Grant, arguably the world's most influential management thinker, joins us to discuss these questions and more.The production team on this episode were PLAN-B’s Nikolai Ovenberg and Niklas Figenschau Johansen. Background research was done by Sigurd Brekke.Links:Watch the episode on YouTube: Norges Bank Investment Management - YouTubeWant to learn more about the fund? The fund | Norges Bank Investment Management (nbim.no)Follow Nicolai Tangen on LinkedIn: Nicolai Tangen | LinkedInFollow NBIM on LinkedIn: Norges Bank Investment Management: Administrator for bedriftsside | LinkedInFollow NBIM on Instagram: Explore Norges Bank Investment Management on Instagram Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hi everyone, and welcome to our podcast in good company. I'm Nikolaj Tangen and leader of the Norwegian Someone Wealth Fund. Today, we are releasing a bonus episode with the one and only Adam Grant, the most influential management thinker in the world. He has also written several of my absolute favorite books. This was a really fascinating conversation, and he challenged me quite a bit. Stay tuned. Well, it's a great pleasure to have you on, Adam.

You are, and my wife will hate me for saying this, but you are actually one of my very favorite people. Well, that must be a very long list, is all I can say. No, it's not actually, because you have written a lot of my really favorite books. But when you were in college, you worked as a professional magician. So what was your favorite trick? Well, I should say I'm long retired, but my favorite trick was a trick where I would tell a story with a deck of cards. And every time I named a card, it would come to the top, even though I was shuffling and the audience got to cut the deck. And it took about five minutes to do. And by the end, no one would let me into a casino. That sounds good. Have you taken anything from the magic into your... Definitely. The element of surprise, I think, has been enormously powerful.

One of the things that I learned as a magician was to misdirect. And I think that as an organizational psychologist, I have to do the same thing. If I told you that, for example, that psychological safety was important to have in an organization, you'd say, of course, I want people to be able to speak up without fear. If instead I lead and tell you, you know, Amy Edmondson found something really surprising in her research. It turned out when she studied hospitals, she found that more psychologically safe teams actually ended up with higher error rates. What's going on there? And then you start to think through, well, maybe when people feel safe with each other, they trust each other

too much. They don't double check each other. And then, you know, mistakes end up sliding. And then I can say, actually, she found in her research that there was a reporting bias that highly psychologically safe teams admitted mistakes, and then they were able to detect them and prevent them. Now you're surprised and intrigued. And that's the same kind of side of hand that I was taught to do as a magician. What's the most surprising thing you found out of your research? In my research, I think, I don't know, I've had a lot of surprises over the last two decades. I think probably the one that still boggles my mind a little bit is that procrastination can be fuel for creativity. I thought for most of my life that it was good to start early and to be focused and to finish a task on time or ideally ahead of schedule. And the idea that putting something off can actually allow you to incubate

was completely foreign to me, but I've gathered enough data now with Jihei Shin that I actually believe it. So procrastination is delaying what you are supposed to do? Correct. Even though you anticipate that there might be a cost. Do you do it? I discovered... I mean, you kind of claim you do it, but I'm just so not believing you. Well, okay. Let's put it this way, Nikolai. I've learned that everyone procrastinates on something. So I, you know, there are certain tasks

that I just can't stand doing. Such as? For me, I guess, I've delegated a lot of them so that they're not part of my job anymore. But one that I still have to do that I can't stand

is proofreading. I mean, I hate, especially when I've written an entire book, I hate the task of then having to reread it to look for typos and mistakes. And so I will put that task off until the absolute last minute, even though I normally like to be a procrastinator and get things done the moment that they were assigned. Talking about your books, my favorite book of all time is basically Give and Take. So what is the main thing in that book? Well, honored, as always, that you read, let alone liked it. I think for me, the main takeaway

of Give and Take is that, first of all, in most workplaces, there are three different styles of interaction that people adopt. So you know this well. We have givers, takers, and matchers. The givers want to know, what can I do for you? The takers are trying to figure out, what could you do for me? And the matchers are basically saying, I'll do something for you if you do something for me. And who is the most successful? to either burn out trying to do other people's jobs and overextending themselves, or they got

taken advantage of by takers. And as they got exploited, they ran out of energy and resources. So I think that smart givers who were thoughtful about managing their boundaries ended up having a greater sense of purpose in the data. So that led to a lot of motivation. They ended up with more social capital. They had people who trusted them by relationship or reputation. And they also learn more. And this is the most interesting part, that the time you spend helping other people solve their problems actually makes you better at solving your organization's problems. But why does it seem that so many takers get to the top? I mean, there are so many people who you don't like who are above you in the system. Well, I think—

I mean, hey, that's not the case for me because I only have fantastic people on top of me. I was going to say, why don't you fix that, Nikolai? You're in a position to do something about it. Look, I think there are a couple of processes at play. The first one is that there's a perception bias. Successful takers are more visible than successful givers, right? They are claiming credit. They want the spotlight. They're very into being the center of attention. And so they tend to be extremely visible and memorable, whereas successful givers are constantly giving

credit to other people. They're very happy to stay in the background. They don't necessarily want the glory. So I think we have to adjust for that is the first thing. I think the second problem is that we're often drawn to takers. There's a lot of evidence that we tend to elevate narcissists into leadership roles, for example, because we confuse their confidence with competence. And they tend to be extremely charming on first impressions. They're also very good at kissing up and then kicking down. So a selfish shaker can be a master of impressing the people above them. And then it's only after they rise that everybody sees their true colors and realizes, wait, this person was actually

all about themselves. And how can we make sure that we don't make that mistake in an organization? Well, I think there's obviously a big problem with our selection and promotion systems and also with our reward systems. I think for starters, we tend to promote people based on individual results. And that's a great way to incentivize people to be takers and also to allow them to get ahead. What I want to do is I want to measure people and their contributions to collective success. So it's great if you're a star individual contributor. I want to know, do you make other people better? And if you start measuring that, it's a lot harder for takers to rise to the top.

And how do you measure that? Well, I think it varies by organization. I think one of the better examples I've seen was at Corning. I went to give a speech there a while back and learned about the Corning Fellows program they have, where if you're named a Corning Fellow, you get a job for life and a lab for life. So Corning is a big American company. Yeah, they're probably best known for the Gorilla Glass for the iPad and the iPhone, which once upon a time was supposed to be impossible. And they're doing a lot of chemical innovation. They have a hard time attracting top talent.

So one day they said, well, if we have to compete with the likes of Apple and Microsoft for star engineers, one way we can compete is to tell you that if you're a success here, then we will give you permanent job security and we'll give you a big playground to work on your own innovations. So the big question is, how do they choose their fellows? And I think a lot of companies would say, if you can drive great innovation success, that is enough. And Corning says, no, they worry that competent takers will pollute the culture. And also once

they give them permanent job security, their contributions are going to dwindle over time. So they say, you've got to be a lead author on a patent that's worth at least a hundred million US dollars, but you also have to be a supporting author on other people's patents. And Nikolai, what I think is genius about this is there are not a lot of takers who sit around saying, you know what? I'm going to pretend to help you for the next nine years in the hopes that you will reward my fake generosity by making me author 34 on your patent. It's the givers who day in and day out are sharing their knowledge, who are mentoring junior people, who are connecting the dots between people who might be siloed, who ultimately add value and earn those supporting authorships. And importantly, Corning says you've got to do both. You have to lead your own success

and you have to elevate other people's success. I have to say there's one thing with where I work now. People are really, really incredibly good at giving credit to other people. And it's a fantastic thing. And of course, we all know who is doing the proper work, right? So you give credit to other people. Everybody knows also at the same time who is really pulling here, right? So you give credit to other people. Everybody knows also at the same time who is really pulling here, right? It should be a win-win if you set it up correctly, because actually giving credit is an act of generosity and it should reflect well on the giver as well

as the receiver. If you could add a chapter to your book, give and take, after now it's eight, nine years ago, what would that chapter be about? There are a few. I'd write a chapter about how to raise a giver as a parent. I'd do a chapter on gender differences, for sure. I do one also on cross-cultural differences in what it means. Okay, let's kick off with the first one. How do one also on cross-cultural differences in what it means. Okay, let's kick off with the first one. How do you raise a giver? I think probably the most interesting thing that I've learned, and I should caveat this by saying as an organizational psychologist, I mostly study these dynamics at work. And so this is me being a

consumer of research, not a producer in this domain, but as a curious person and a parent, I've wanted to know, how do we teach kids to be generous? And I think we all know that actions speak louder than words. What I didn't realize though, is that some of our words are extremely powerful. So there was a Harvard study a few years ago showing that if you ask parents what they want for their kids, they say, above all else, I want my kids to be caring and happy. But if you ask parents what they want for their kids, they say, above all else, I want my kids to be caring and happy. But if you ask their kids what they think their parents want, they say, I think my parents want me to be successful. They want me to be a high achiever. Well, why is that? One of the main reasons for it is that parents have conversations with their

kids much more about success than they do generosity. I mean, we've seen this in our own household. How many times did our kids come home from school and we ask them, how did you do on the test? How many goals did you score? And those are achievement questions. What we've learned to ask now is, who did you help this week? Which sends a clear signal to our kids. We care about your kindness, right? Not just your accomplishments. And then my wife, Allison, added another question to our weekly sort of dinner conversation, which was, who helped you this week? And I didn't get it at first, Nicola. I remember saying to her, no, I want them to be givers, not takers. Let's not focus on what they get. And she said, no, no, no.

What I'm trying to do is I'm trying to get them to focus on which of their classmates are givers so that they might make friends with the kindest kids as opposed to just the most popular ones. Your most recent book was called Think Again. Now, why is it so difficult to change your mind? I think a lot of leaders are, they're very attached to the ego and image rewards of being right.

And they've probably gotten promoted to where they are because they've been right very frequently. And so to confront the idea that you're wrong or you even might be wrong is destabilizing. It starts to call into question your intelligence, your competence, your judgment, and nobody really enjoys doing that. I also think that we tend to be comfortable in our realm of experience. So if your experience points you in one direction and changing your mind requires you to walk away from what's familiar to you. That feels like a risk. It's a leap into the unknown. And we all like predictability better than uncertainty. So how can you develop this? How do you get an organization to develop this mindset of rethinking and re-questioning? Well, I think for me, the mindset really starts in our own heads. I've found that too many leaders spend too much of their time

thinking like preachers, prosecutors, and politicians. So in preacher mode, you're basically trying to proselytize your own views. In prosecutor mode, you're attacking somebody else's views. And in politician mode, you don't even bother to listen to people unless they already agree with your views. And all three of those mindsets can stop you from questioning yourself because you've already concluded that you're right and other people are wrong. My favorite alternative to preaching, prosecuting, and politicking is to think more like a scientist. And Nikolai, when I say think like a scientist, I do not mean that you need to own a microscope or buy a telescope, or an observatory for that matter. I just mean that you don't let your ideas become part of your identity. I think a good

scientist, we all know this, good scientists have the humility to know what they don't know. They have the curiosity to seek new knowledge. And they realize that most of their opinions are just hypotheses waiting to be tested. Most of their decisions are experiments. So what I want to do is I want to get organizations to think more scientifically, which means when you have a strategy, you recognize that's just a theory. When you're about to make a decision, instead of implementing what you think is the best option, see if you can run an A-B test or pilot some of the alternatives and figure out whether your intuition or your instinct was right or wrong.

Interesting. That's kind of what differentiates good and bad investors. The good investors are pretty stubborn, but they're able to change their mind when the facts change. And you see some of the kind of classic, incredible investors such as Stan Druckenmiller has this agility, which very few people have. But if you think about beliefs that we need to rethink, now, what do you think are the most important beliefs that we really need to rethink in today's society? Well, I actually think that in some ways, the most dangerous belief of all is what's become my favorite cognitive bias. I know you've studied cognitive biases in great depth, not only as an investor, but also when you did your master's in social psychology for fun, which I would love to talk about.

You know, whenever I ask people what they think is the most problematic bias, somebody will say, well, confirmation bias, for sure. Or somebody else will say, you know, I really worry about the Dunning-Kruger effect. Whatever is on your list, I think the root of most of those biases is what I've come to think of as the I'm not biased bias, which is the sort of the meta belief that other people have moments of irrationality and distortions to their thought, but me, I'm immune to those.

I'm objective. I'm neutral. I am a logical, rational processor of information. And it turns out that the smarter you are, the higher you score on IQ tests, the more likely you are to fall victim to the I'm not biased bias. So the very people who are the best at reasoning are the worst at seeing the flaws in their own reasoning. are the worst at seeing the flaws in their own reasoning. And I think the beginning for me of becoming, I guess, a better thinker is abandoning the I'm not biased bias,

recognizing that we all have distortions to our thought process. And that opens the door then for you to catch and correct whatever other biases you might be susceptible to. you might be susceptible to. I guess this brings us to confident humility, right? You need to be confident, but you need to be humble. And in a way, it sounds a bit like a contradiction in terms. Why is it not?

Well, you know this as well as I do. It's not a contradiction because if you go back to the Latin roots of the word humility, which as a social scientist, I feel a responsibility to do, you will see very quickly that one of the original translations is from the earth. So humility is not about being meek or lacking confidence. It's about being grounded and knowing that you're human, that you're fallible, that you

have weaknesses and you're capable of making mistakes. So that can go hand in hand with confidence, right? You can be very secure in your strengths while also being acutely aware of your shortcomings. You can have a lot of conviction in your knowledge in one area and a tremendous amount of doubt in your knowledge in another area. You can be self-assured about your leadership skills, but extremely uncertain when it comes to what's going to amount to effective leadership in the midst of a pandemic. And I think that's what confident humility looks like. It's saying, I don't know yet, but I believe I can figure it out.

How do you develop it? I don't know. I just studied this. How did you develop it? I don't think I have it. I think I'm confident, but perhaps not humble enough. That's interesting. What makes you say that? confident but perhaps not humble enough that's interesting what makes you say that because i think that's how some external people would perceive me i i find that surprising i think i mean i i certainly i wouldn't disagree with the idea that you're confident uh i've i've

definitely been uh been struck by your your conviction in many situations over the past few years. But I also feel like you're very quick to admit what you don't know. And you're very comfortable acknowledging that there are things you're not good at. Those seem like hallmarks of humility. Is this just, I remember when I first came to Oslo, I learned about Jante Loven. came to Oslo, I learned about Jante Loven. And maybe what's happening here is you're expressing humility by claiming a lack of humility. Well, it's an interesting question. Let's discuss that over a bottle of wine next time you visit, right? This is the danger of inviting a podcaster to be the guest. I'm going to try to grab the mic

and be the host. Watch out. No, I love it. I love it. Let's change tack a bit here. You do a lot of work on, well, on work. What is work going to look like in the future? I don't know. I have no idea. I think there's an old joke that it's dangerous to predict the future because historians don't even predict the past with very much accuracy. So I think this is an exercise that requires far more humility than confidence. I think, you know, particularly with generative AI sort of evolving at a rate far faster than any of us anticipated. I really don't have a good handle on how work is going to change. I have some hunches, maybe some hypotheses about, you know,

five to 10 year horizon shifts, but I wouldn't bet on any of them. What do you think work is going to look like? But give it a stop. Give it a stop. What do you think? I guess the first one I would make is I think we're going to see more people organize around occupations as opposed to organizations. If you think back hundreds of years to when people were sort of organized into guilds according to skill as opposed to belonging to a particular organization with a mission and values, I think there's a decent chance that we might go back in that direction. I think people are increasingly dissatisfied with the idea of trusting one employer and assuming that they will necessarily be able to get everything they're looking for from a job, from a purpose, from a community in one organization. And I think project-based work

has already risen in the past decade. I think project-based work has already risen in the past decade. I think increasingly there will be people, particularly knowledge workers, who are motivated to say, you know, I would like to be able to rent my skills to the highest bidder and also to team up with people who don't necessarily live in the same place or work for the same employer as me, but ultimately are motivated to pursue a common mission. So I think that might be a shift that happens, but what do I know? Are we going to work from offices? I think some of us will work from offices some of the time. I think if you look at the data in the industrialized world, it seems that the norm right now is for, you know, where

possible for people to work from an office three, maybe four days a week and have part of the week to work from anywhere. I think that that makes sense in light of the evidence, which is very clear that as long as people are together at least half the week, you get higher productivity, higher satisfaction, higher retention, and there are no known costs to collaboration. In fact, when we're not collaborating all the time, our collaborations are more creative because we have time to advance our own work. We can find flow, we can concentrate, and then we can make the most of our collaboration time to learn from each other and to create together. So I don't think that the office is indispensable when it comes to every day of the work week. I do think that running an all-remote

organization is hard. I think it's hard to build culture. I think it's hard to exchange tacit knowledge. I think it's hard to have enough sort of unstructured interaction to solve problems or even identify problems that aren't on the radar. So I'd like to have us gather somewhere from time to time, but I don't know that it has to be a traditional office. How do you view the concept of work-life balance? Is there such a thing? I've never liked the term balance. I think it creates this unrealistic image that we have all the different parts of our life in perfect equilibrium at any given moment. And I think it's much more realistic to say what we want is a steady work-life rhythm where I'm, I guess, musically ignorant enough that this metaphor might not work. But if you think of a song, you have different beats, different melodies, different lyrics, but you also have a chorus.

And I think that it's probably reasonable to think about some kind of work-life rhythm or harmony at the level of a week rather than a day and say, you may have a couple of days in a given week that are extremely lopsided toward work and you don't get enough time for family, friends, hobbies. And then you might have a few other days that week that are kind of tilted in the opposite direction. You don't do much work, but you prioritize everything else that matters to you. And I think that at that level, you know, maybe what it feels like is there's a rhythm where, you know, if you look at any given day, it's out of balance. But if you look at your week, you feel like you're hitting all the right notes. Adam, how much do you work?

I've given up on counting that. I think it just varies so much based on, you know, the time of day and the time of year. I think probably if I had to create an average, it would be, I don't know, probably 60 hours a week. 10 years ago, it was more like 100. And I decided I didn't like that version of myself. Why not? Why not?

One, I was really boring. Two, I wasn't making enough time for the people who mattered to me and three i was less creative i think i was you know i was so focused on getting things done that i wasn't i guess working that much required for me really high attentional filters to weed out distractions and to focus on the immediate goals I was trying to achieve. And what that meant was I didn't have any peripheral vision. I didn't let in fresh ideas. I didn't have spontaneous interactions. And yeah, I guess that made me a boring thinker along with a boring person. Well, a boring thinker you are for sure not. But it just strikes me that so many of the super high achievers I interview on this podcast and meet, they just work a lot, right? There is a lot of hard work behind success. Yeah, I've come to wonder if quantity is not overrated, though. I think, you know, for most people, they're diminishing returns as you start

to push the boundaries of 50, 60, 70 hours a week of work and quality does drop. I think that's a risk. I think also there's some newer evidence that I found really fascinating that when you work nights and weekends, your intrinsic motivation actually drops because you realize there are other things that you could be doing. And so it may become harder to sustain the meaning and the drive that comes from within if you end up on one of these grueling schedules. How much do you work, Nikolai? Well, I guess I work pretty much all the time.

But, you know, I just love it. I just seriously love it. I love investing. I love working with the people here, try to develop them. I love to learn. I love to read. I don't know.

This is just like, this is just a fantastic place to be in but then i've been lucky i've been able to take some years off from time to time to to go back and study so it's kind of i don't really believe in doing things at the same time i just take long long breaks and then you know try to recover and uh but I'm just really fortunate because I just have such an incredible job. Well, our colleague Nancy Rothbard would call you an engaged workaholic then. Somebody who works a lot out of joy and love and interest as opposed to guilt and pressure. Yeah. No, that could be. But that's not a bad thing.

Adam, you have studied so many aspects of corporate culture. And what do you think is the most underrated aspect of creating a great culture. I think it's, I'm torn between a couple of elements, but if I had to choose one, I think the one that is probably the most underrated is, this is so hard. Okay. I think it's probably storytelling. I think the organizations that I've seen where culture is truly strong in the sense that we all agree on what our values and norms are, and we all are passionately committed to them. The organizations that have fostered that are remarkable at storytelling. And which are? Pixar is a phenomenal example. I cannot tell you how many times I've heard the story from the 1980s during my visits to Pixar of basically the co-founders, Ed Catmull and L.V. Ray Smith, were told by some

consultants that they had to downsize. And they refused. And they said, look, we believe in every person we've hired. And the board eventually said, you have to downsize. And there was a demand to put two names on a piece of paper by the next morning. And the next morning, there were two names. And the co-founders had written their own names. And the next morning there were two names, uh, and the co-founders had written their own names and they said, if you need to remove someone, you should fire us. And that story has been told at Pixar for a generation now. Um, and I think it symbolizes the respect and value for people that they hold dear. I think it, you know, it symbolizes integrity in leadership in a way that we don't

see very often. And that story is told in part so that as a new person, when I join, I might, at this point, I probably wasn't even born if I'm a new hire at Pixar when that moment happened. But hearing that story tells me what the values are. It shows me leaders who founded the company upholding those values. And it gives me a North Star to follow as I find myself in situations where I'm not sure what the right thing to do is, or I'm not sure what exactly our values would suggest. And I think that most leaders, this is another colleague of ours, Drew Carton, he's shown that most leaders tend to rise in part because they tend to be very abstract thinkers. And that makes them good at solving strategic problems. But when they get into a top leadership role, then they struggle to tell the very concrete stories that bring the values to life, that make it feel like you can touch and taste and see the vision.

And so I think storytelling is vital to culture building. And what's the key to good storytelling? Um, I think that in, in a culture context, uh, great stories, this is, um, there's a paper by Sean Martin on this, where he shows that the most powerful culture stories we can tell are about, they're about, actually about junior people upholding values when senior leaders are not looking. So even better than the Pixar story I told would be somebody at the very bottom of the hierarchy going above and beyond to live a principle that's important, even though, you know, probably no one's aware that they're doing it. that's important, even though probably no one's aware that they're doing it. And I think, I guess the skill involved in telling that story is first to find it, to be clear about what your core values are and find what does it look like? What are the key behaviors involved in exemplifying those values? And then to animate it in such a way that is both

aspirational, that it's going to elevate us, but also is achievable and lead us to say, well, I could do that too. How important is fun and humor? Huh. Fun and humor. Well, I would say I'm not a big fan of mandatory fun, which is an oxymoron. I think, look, I think, actually, I like Dan Coyle's distinction

between what he calls deep fun and shallow fun. Shallow fun at work is, you know, ping pong tables and trust falls and icebreaker games. Deep fun is the joy of working on a hard problem that everyone cares about and is excited to dig into. And I don't know how to build a thriving culture or a creative team without deep fun? I think shallow fun is an open question. It's probably better in some cultures than others. But yeah, I guess the humor question is interesting. This is actually growing.

It's a topic of growing interest in organizations. And there have been a bunch of studies. Michael Park at Wharton has done some interesting research on leader humor. One of the findings I've seen consistently is that when leaders crack jokes, it's critical for them to be self-deprecating, not other-deprecating. It's too easy for other people to feel demeaned and demoralized by leader humor. And so if you're the butt of your own joke, it shows the kind of humility we were talking about earlier. And it also unites people around being able to sort of point out

what the leader could do better because they know you can laugh at yourself. You have a podcast and it's not like it's a small podcast. It's one of the most successful podcasts in the world. What are some of the cool things you learned from your guests? Oh, what have I learned from my guests? I think one of the – there have been a lot of guests who have taught me interesting things. I think one of the more interesting things I've learned recently is I've had a couple of conversations with Brene Brown over the years, and she got me to think differently about emotional contagion at work. I'd always thought

about strong emotions being contagious. So, you know, leader excitement, for example, would spread and fire people up. You know, anxiety might, you know, very quickly lead people to, you know, to sort of panic. And one of the things that Brene highlighted to me recently was that a leader's job is to create the space between stimulus and response. That leaders could actually be carriers of calm. stimulus and response, that leaders could actually be carriers of calm. And I'd never thought about this before, but some of the leaders I've looked up to the most are the ones who in crisis, you know, sort of have extra equanimity and, you know, don't show a strong emotional reaction. They signal concern, they focus people's attention on the problem, but they also have a very steady hand. And I never thought about calm contagion as a skill that we could build. So that was a bit of a light bulb for me. Yeah, I think that's probably something I also need to build there.

Now, you have a book coming out in October, I believe, Hidden Potential. I'm sure there are not so much you can say about it because you have a contract with a publisher, but if you had to say something, what would it be? Well, what I'll say is, this is a book that I wrote and realized it's been a theme in everything I've ever studied. I think that we live in a world that's obsessed with innate talent. So we tend to admire child prodigies in music, naturally gifted athletes in sports, you know, wunderkinds and geniuses who show immediate flashes of superior capability. And I think that leads us to underestimate the underdogs, the late bloomers,

who may not, you know, wow us with their starting abilities, but ultimately demonstrate an ability to make great progress. And so I guess I realized when reflecting on some of, I guess, my own accomplishments that the ones I was proudest of were not the greatest heights, but they were the situations where I traveled the greatest distance. So an example is when I was a diver, a springboard diver, I lacked all semblances of natural talent. I could hardly jump. I couldn't touch my toes without bending my knees. Had no explosive power, flexibility, grace. I walked like Frankenstein. And it was pretty clear I was never going to make the Olympics. And I was stunned to ultimately make the Junior Olympic Nationals twice and get recruited to dive in college. And one day my coach said to me, you know, Adam, you got further with less talent

than any diver I've ever coached. And that meant so much more to me than if I had made the Olympics. Although, you know, that's also an easy story to tell yourself. But what really stuck out at me was I felt like I had earned the progress, right. I didn't get to decide my natural ability or lack thereof. All I could do was shape the amount of growth I achieved. And so I guess I sat down to write Hidden Potential to explain how can we get better at recognizing the potential in others who may not show those early flashes of brilliance. But more importantly, how do we bring that out in ourselves? How can we unleash our own hidden potential? So I guess more on that in October. Absolutely. But in the meantime, if you were to translate that into advice to young people,

what would it be? I'd say don't judge your potential by your initial abilities. by your initial abilities. If you give up on a skill or a goal because you fail early, you're doing yourself a disservice. Fantastic place to end. Adam, it's been a real pleasure having you on and it's a real privilege to know you. Thank you for everything you write

and uh we cannot wait for october thank you nicolai pleasure is all mine thank you well that was very good you be the judge uh how did how did that go relative to your expectations much better really you thought so little of me oh i love your false modesty um no because i thought it flowed really well and um you are so easy to um to interrupt and your you know your answers are a perfect length and it's easy to interrupt and no i was it was brilliant. That's interesting. I felt like I went a little long on a few answers and could have made more room for back and forth.

No, it was perfect. Absolutely perfect. Amazing. Well, real pressure. And hope to see you in Oslo or anywhere else, anytime. Just tell me where to fly. I'll fly to see you. I will try not to make you, anytime. Same. Just tell me where to fly. I'll fly to see you. I will try not to make you regret that.

Wonderful. Good seeing you. Thanks, Nikolaj. Have a wonderful summer. You too. Take care. Bye.