Passion Struck with John R. Miles - David S. Yeager on the Science of Inspiring Young Minds EP 499

Episode Date: August 27, 2024

In this captivating episode of Passion Struck, host John R. Miles engages with Dr. David S. Yeager, a leading professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, to uncover the science behind inspiring and motivating young minds. Dr. Yeager, who has worked with renowned experts such as Carol Dweck and Angela Duckworth, offers transformative insights into how adults can help young people thrive during their most critical developmental years.Through his groundbreaking research, Dr. Yeager explores in his new book the unique developmental stage from ages 10 to 25, when the brain is especially sensitive to social status and respect. He introduces the concept of the "mentor mindset," showing how adults can effectively guide young people by understanding their social and emotional needs. Dr. Yeager's insights go beyond theory—his practical advice empowers parents, educators, and mentors to create environments where young people can flourish.In this episode, you’ll discover the keys to unlocking the potential of adolescents and young adults, gaining valuable tools to foster growth, resilience, and well-being in the next generation.Full show notes and resources: https://passionstruck.com/david-s-yeager-science-of-inspiring-young-minds/SponsorsBabbel: Unlock the power of learning a new language with Babbel's innovative system. Passion Struck listeners can get 60% off their subscription at Babbel.com/PASSION.Hims: Regrow your hair before it's too late! Start your free online visit today at Hims.com/PASSIONSTRUCK.Quince: Experience luxury for less with Quince's premium products at radically low prices. Enjoy free shipping and 365-day returns at Quince.com/PASSION.For more information about our sponsors and promo codes, visit: passionstruck.com/dealsIn this episode, you will learn:The science behind motivating young peopleHow to adopt the mentor mindset to effectively guide adolescentsWhy social status and respect are crucial in adolescent developmentThe transformative power of fostering a growth mindsetTechniques for avoiding miscommunication with young peopleThe role of environment in shaping beliefs and behaviorsStrategies for addressing the rise in adolescent mental health challengesActionable tips to unlock the potential of young individualsConnect with David Yeager: LinkedIn ProfileOrder Passion StruckUnlock the principles that will transform your life! Order my book, Passion Struck: Twelve Powerful Principles to Unlock Your Purpose and Ignite Your Most Intentional Life. Recognized as a 2024 must-read by the Next Big Idea Club, this book has earned accolades such as the Business Minds Best Book Award, the Eric Hoffer Award, and the Non-Fiction Book Awards Gold Medal. Order your copy today and ignite your journey toward intentional living!Catch More Passion StruckCan’t miss my episode with Angela Duckworth on the Keys to Achieving Long-Term SuccessListen to my interview with Angela Foster on Biosyncing for Peak Health and HappinessWatch my episode with Tricia Manning on How to Lead With Heart and Leave a LegacyCatch my interview with Katy Milkman on Creating Lasting Behavior Change for GoodIf you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a review! Even one sentence helps. Be sure to include your Twitter or Instagram handle so we can personally thank you!

Coming up next on Passion Strike. So the payoff of a college degree is higher now than ever. Now, a lot of people like to bash college these days and say, well, I don't need a college degree to go be an influencer on TikTok or whatever. And we need more welding programs, et cetera. But people have looked at a lot of those data and you can think of higher education as a hedge against the floor and less of a guarantee of a very high position in terms of your earning and your wages and your income. Welcome to Passion Struck.

Hi, I'm your host, John R. Miles. And on the show, we decipher the secrets, tips, and guidance of the world's most inspiring people and turn their wisdom into practical advice for you and those around you. Our mission is to help you unlock the power of intentionality so that you can become the best version of yourself. If you're new to the show, I offer advice and answer listener questions on Fridays. We have long form interviews the rest of the week with guests ranging from astronauts to authors, CEOs, creators, innovators, scientists, military leaders, visionaries, and athletes. Now, let's go out there and become passion-struck.

Hello everyone, and welcome back to episode 499 of Passion Struck. A huge thank you to each of you who show up week after week, eager to grow, learn, and find new ways to live a life of purpose and impact. You are the heartbeat of this community, and I am so grateful for your continued support. If you're new here, welcome to the movement. And for those of you who've been thinking about sharing the show with a friend or a family member, which we absolutely love, we've got something

special to make it easy. With 500 episodes on the horizon, it can be tough to know where to jump in. That's why we've created episodes starter packs, curated playlists to help you hit the ground running. Whether you're into behavior science, physical and mental health, astronauts, military leaders, or powerhouse women, we've got a playlist for you. Just head over to Spotify or visit

passionstruck.com slash starter packs and find your perfect entry point. In case you missed it, earlier this week, I had some incredible conversations with two fascinating guests. First up, Hala Taha, the dynamic host of the Young and Profiting podcast and an unstoppable entrepreneur. We dig into her inspiring journey from

corporate world to media mobile, uncovering the strategies behind her meteoric rise. This episode is packed with gems on hustling with purpose, building your personal brand, and taking control of your life. behind her meteoric rise. This episode is packed with gems on hustling with purpose, building your personal brand, and taking control of your life. Trust me, you don't want to miss it. I also sat down with Michael McCourt, CEO of EpiOne and a visionary in the fight against cancer. From his roots in West Berlin to leading groundbreaking innovations in early cancer

detection, Michael's story is one of resilience, personal loss, and a mission to revolutionize healthcare. His work is saving lives, and loss, and a mission to revolutionize healthcare. His work is saving lives, and his journey will inspire you to rethink what's possible. Be sure to check out both of these episodes, and as always, your ratings and reviews mean the world to us. If you're loving today's episode, please leave us a 5-star review and share it with your friends and family. Your support helps this community grow, and we love hearing your thoughts.

Before we dive into this episode, I have some exciting news to share. My book Passionstruck won Best Business Book and Best E-Book at the 2024 International Business Awards. The IBA's known as the Stevie Awards are the world's premier business awards program drawing entries from 62 nations and territories. For context, the Stevie's are akin to the Oscars within the business world, celebrating outstanding achievements on an international stage. In addition to that, the book hit number one on Amazon, in multiple categories, and number seven overall, across all the charts, making it an international bestseller. Lastly, I also learned the book took gold medal at the Global Book Awards in the category of Business Life and silver medal in self-help. Thank you so much for your support.

Now let's discuss today's episode where I have the privilege of hosting Dr. David Yeager, a distinguished professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin and the co-founder of the Texas Behavioral Science and Policy Institute. Dr. Yeager is renowned for his groundbreaking research alongside Carol Dweck, Angela Duckworth, and Greg Walton, which has significantly influenced adolescent behaviors including motivation, engagement, healthy eating, bullying, stress, and mental health. Dr. Yeager's expertise has been sought after by global giants like Google, Microsoft, Disney,

and the World Bank, as well as by the White House and state governments across the US and Norway. His work has been prominently featured in major publications such as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Scientific American, and many more. Clarivate Web of Science ranks him among the top 0.1% of most influential psychologists in the world over the past decade. Today we'll be diving into his new book, 10 to 25, The Science of Motivating Young People. Imagine a world where interactions with Gen Xers, Millennials, and Boomers leave young people. Imagine a world where interactions with Gen Xers, Millennials, and Boomers leave young people feeling inspired, enthusiastic, and ready to contribute. Dr. Yeager's cutting-edge research shows us how to stop fearing young people's brains and hormones and start harnessing

their potential. Neuroscientists have discovered that around age 10, puberty spurs the brain to crave socially rewarding experiences and become highly averse to social pain. This sensitivity to status and respect continues into the mid-20s. 10 to 25 helps adults develop the right approach to communicate effectively and avoid frustrating miscommunications. In today's episode, Dr. Yeager introduces the Mentor Mindset, a leadership style that respects young people's need for status and respect, as well as long-term strategies to nurture well-adjusted, independent, and accomplished young people who contribute positively to society, all while making

our own lives easier. Join us as we explore these transformative insights with Dr. David Yeager. Let's dive into the science of motivating young people and learn how we can all play a part in shaping a brighter future. Thank you for choosing Passionstruck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life. Now, let that journey begin. I am so thrilled today to welcome Dr. David Yeager to Passionstruck. Welcome, David.

Thanks for having me. So I'd love to start these episodes out by allowing the audience to get to know you better. Can you tell me a little bit about your background? I know you grew up in Texas and you live in Austin now, but can you share a little bit more about you and what led you to pursue getting a PhD? So I was a middle school teacher straight out of college

and spent a lot of time just working with young people and figuring out how to motivate them, inspire them, mentor them. I think that what I loved about being a teacher was the many different hats I had to wear. So I was the K through eight PE coach. I was the six through eight English teacher. During my lunch periods, I was the English as a second language teacher for mostly kids who'd immigrated recently from Guadalajara. So I had learned some Spanish by living and

working in Chile in an orphanage for a while. So I was able to use that during my lunch periods. And then I coached basketball and ran the computer club and so on. And I just loved working with kids and trying to have whatever interaction I had with them be something that pushed them in a better trajectory. But I was ultimately dissatisfied with the level of advice I got in a lot of my training. Not that I didn't like the program I was in, but just in general, the science of how to motivate and influence young people I felt was not super practical and maybe not nearly as based in legitimate science as it needed to be. And so then I went to graduate school

to study adolescents and young people and try to combine it with a rigorous experimental approach that could ultimately discover the difference between saying something in way A and saying and I was able to develop a new way of thinking about things that I was interested in and I was able to develop a new way of thinking about things that I was interested in and I was able to develop a new way of thinking about things that I was interested in and I was able to

develop a new way of thinking about things that I was interested in and I was able to develop a new way of thinking about things that I was interested in and I was able and Gret Walton, who are social psychologists. And then that launched me into a career in academia. And then I got hired at the University of Texas at Austin. And I've been there ever since, just trying to continue that experimental tradition of really testing alternative ways of reaching and promoting wellbeing

and healthy behavior for the next generation. That's interesting. As I mentioned to you beforehand, I recently had Mary Murphy on the show who really applied growth mindset to the professional environment, especially in how teams perform, et cetera. When I typically think of a growth mindset, I think of it from an individual perspective, but how would you overall define it? So the audience kind of has a level playing

field for understanding how it differs from a fixed mindset and why this is so important, especially with adolescents. And Mary and I were in overlap just a little bit in graduate school together and she's done an awesome job, not just in taking growth mindset into organizations, but also thinking about equity. And some of her initial work, it was the idea that if you have an organizational culture in which the leader acts in a very fixed mindset way,

it's not just bad for everybody, it's especially bad for members of groups who are underrepresented or stereotyped in some setting. And so she was the first person to put the ideas around stereotype threat together with the ideas around mindset. And I think my route to growth mindset is different, but actually ended up with some of my most exciting work being collaborations with Mary. So that's why it was important to mention it.

My starting point was thinking initially about mindset as an individual variable in the way that you just described. But I wasn't thinking at the start about academics, I was thinking more about the social life. So in my dissertation work, we focus on why do high schoolers who get bullied and victimized sometimes sit around thinking about taking revenge and fantasizing about sometimes violence against the people who offended them. And other times, another negative outcome could be being unable to cope. So just getting in this tornado of distress and poor well being. And what we found in our early work, Carol Dweck and I, is that the more that kids had a fixed mindset of personality, the idea that you're either a good person or a bad person,

then that can't change. You're either a bully or a victim, and you never leave that label behind. The more you thought in that all or nothing worldview about social life in high school, the more kids on the one hand, and on the other hand, relatedly, were really distressed, showing higher cortisol levels and so on in their saliva.

And so what we did was to adapt growth mindset to interventions that taught young people that people can change. So the idea is that you never really know when or how someone can change, but if you believe it's at least possible, then alternative coping strategies, I don't know, talking it out with someone or just waiting for a bully to mature, or even righteous anger. So being angry at somebody, but in a way that might change them. them, that the more those types of solutions start coming to mind. And we found that pretty short growth mindset treatments to high schoolers could reduce aggressive and revengeful behavior and also promote better coping. Uh, and even prevent the onset of depression across the

tough transition to high school. So that was my initial work with Carol Dweck on growth mindset. And that led me to test those growth mindset of personality interventions and larger samples and led me to take it from in our initial studies, a, a kind of six session workshop we did at a low income high school face to face with well-trained facilitators to later being a 35 minute online module that students could complete. And that was pretty exciting

because we basically developed, this is 15 years ago, a single session online treatment that in some studies reduce depressive symptoms by 20 to 40% without ever kids visiting a therapist or needing any clinical training. That work has gone on to be influential in the clinical psych literature. A lot of great people like Jessica Schleider have taken it and run with it. But

what got me really interested in the next phase of growth mindset research was saying, all right, well, what else would need to be in place in order for a short mindset intervention delivered to a young person to consistently have effects over time. And so what we really focused on was larger and larger experiments testing whether a message about people can people's ability to change could have enduring effects. And in what kind of context would you see that last or not? And that led to a bunch of experiments, many of them back in the growth mindset of intelligence world, the kind of more classic view about your intelligence being something that can change, not like in my newer work about your character or personality changing.

And what we found in those studies is that the more that young people were taught, hey, in the intelligence case, hey, your smartness can change. You're not dumb at math if you struggle. The more that low achieving students tended to embrace challenge, take on harder classes, get better grades, and in our new studies, even years later, four years later, graduate from high school. So that's nice replication of the canonical growth mindset that you and others may be familiar with, very large sample experiments. But the kind of kicker, the twist was that the short online intervention, 30 minutes given to ninth graders in our studies, lasted

more successfully when there were supportive resources in the classroom and or the school. If the teacher held more of a growth mindset, for instance, we saw larger effects on students' math grades a year later. If the school had more abundant resources for challenge seeking and taking AP classes and getting on track to advance coursework, then the short intervention lasted much more powerfully for low achieving students. And that led me to looping back to think about changing the context for mindset rather than just changing the individual's mindset. And at the time, Mary Murphy was, and I think still is, the leading voice in thinking about the leadership styles of mindset.

And so where we've teamed up in our work with also Chris Brian and Carol Dweck and others is to think about, all right, how do you start imagining the mindset of the leader? And how does that interact with the mindset of a mentee, a student, an employee, someone that's under working under your leadership? And, and that's where the there's some really exciting advances and new puzzles. Uh, but the main punchline is that you can't really expect to just give a young person a mindset like it's penicillin and all of a sudden they're immune to any antigen that they encounter.

It's like a vaccine, right, that prevents them from further exposure, really further disease after exposure to some virus. Instead, mindset is more like a set of lenses that prepare you to view the world in a certain way. If you give a student a growth mindset, they're like, you're giving them a new Bayesian prior, a new kind of updated pair of glasses to view the world in a potentially growth mindset way. But then the actions, the kind of words and deeds and opportunities of the leader need to make that growth mindset worldview feel plausible and

actionable on behalf of the young person. And so that's where we've gone from thinking of mindset as an individual quality, a belief I have about my efforts, my social world, my abilities and traits, about my efforts, my social world, my abilities and traits to something that's a little more interactive where it's, I'm a person that's in a context that's managed by some leader who sets the rules of engagement. And it's actually relevant what rules they set. I can't just rely on my own personal theory of my own success. I also have to have a theory about the opportunities provided by the leader that I'm going to encounter. David, thanks for sharing that. And I want to take a couple steps

back. So today, the primary, I guess it's not even showing it, it's not showing your book, but the primary reason we're here today is to discuss your new book, 10 to 25, The Science of Motivating Young People. The subtitle is a groundbreaking approach to leading the next generation and making your own life easier. And I wanted to take a couple steps back to go deeper into this. So various studies and experts that I've talked to have indicated that the level of depression, anxiety, et cetera, is on the rise across society, but specifically on the rise in adolescence. And it's hard to measure it completely because typically you can't do large studies

of people under the age of 18. But based on your work, what do you think are some of the things that are driving it? The first thing to just acknowledge is that there are a lot of supposed experts out there that aren't really summarizing the data in a way that's

faithful to what the data are showing. There's a lot of people with agendas and there's a lot of, what I like to say is there's a lot of common sense that's actually nonsense. So I think it's reasonable for any listener to be skeptical of what we're hearing. It's not, there's not really coherent story, but I will say that on the question of whether there's a rise in clinically significant symptoms for mental health problems among young people, that's a hundred percent valid. So every year since the great recession in 2008, 2009, when there's the kind of mortgage crisis, the collapse of our economy really around the world, not collapse, but just a really serious dent in the economy.

Every year since then, there's been an increase in clinically significant symptoms of generalized anxiety disorder, and to some extent, depression. And it's actually not that hard to measure. There's this simple measure called the GAD7, and the core items from that are administered on surveys run by the Pew organization

that are random samples of the nation, and that are in general very good at tracking trends over time. Other surveys like monitoring the future do this too. And what you saw was a really striking increase up until 2020 and then a tripling according to some metrics once the pandemic started. So it was like already the worst on record and then it tripled. What does that mean though? Well, the items on the GAD are things like I can't stop thinking about the bad things happening to me.

Right? It's the idea that impending doom is something that you can't get out of your head. Now, what's the stereotype of someone who can't stop thinking about the bad things happening either to them or the world, right? Once you know what kinds of questions are actually asked to people, you imagine a different stereotype than if I just told you that you have an anxiety disorder, right? If you think of the stereotype of someone with an anxiety disorder is, oh, they can't get their stuff together, basically, right? That's just, that's the societal stereotype. But someone who is constantly thinking about what bad thing could happen to the world, that's also someone who really cares about the world and who wants it to be better. Maybe people are worried about global warming and the destruction of the human race. And people differ on how

imminent that threat is in their minds, but over 80% of Americans do think that humans are causing threat is in their minds, but over 80% of Americans do think that humans are causing changes in the climate and that it's a bad thing, right? So it's not, you're not crazy if you're concerned about changes in the climate that are human made. And that's another big issue is political division. And by any metric that exists today, we're more divided politically than we were at least in the last few decades, the post-war era. And whatever side of the political spectrum you're on, there's probably a lot of forces causing you to pay attention to that and be worried about it.

Anyone who has ever given money to any campaign is now getting eight to 20 text messages every day from some candidate that is using all caps saying so and so got destroyed and so political event. And now there's a so and so 900% match for your dollar. And I don't know, like what's the experience of receiving all caps text messages nine to 10 times a day for your political team. Right. And you can go down the list of any of the major existential crises of the day. They demand a lot of attention. And it's also not an accident that they demand a lot of attention because the entire news media is set up to grab our attention because their financial model revolves

around advertising. A lot of people have written about this, Amanda Ripley and others have written books about how it's not an accident that news stories flash across the screen in all caps about the next crisis about to hit us, and linking it to some enduring theme. So this is a long way of saying it's very hard to pinpoint the exact cause of the youth mental health crisis, but it's a little too glib, I think, and simplified to try to pin it on one thing that has a concrete and easy solution. And it's also probably not very accurate to pin it on the next generation being weak-minded and wimpy and overly sensitive. And I hear that a lot.

I hear a lot of, well, in my day, everything sucked and we just put up with it. And it's like, you know what? The early nineties were like this magical period of narrowing income inequality and explosion of wealth and public safety, that Tom Piketty has written about this, like never been replicated for all of human history. So that was your experience in your twenties or teens. There's not like a good old days. It was like you were living through one of the rarest moments of all time.

And I think that the first step in thinking about the youth mental health crisis is not to rush to judge any one thing like smartphones or TikTok and say it's turning everyone's brains to mush. And that's an example of how this generation is like weak minded and lack self-control and instead think about, well, what are all the geopolitical events that are on the minds, especially of young people who are trying to figure out what kind of society they're about to inhabit? And once you view it through that perspective as wow, maybe it's actually harder to be a young

person than it's ever been before, because there are more actors out there trying to force extreme crisis information down your throat at all times. And you have to figure out how to manage that while like not having a secure career yet or a mortgage or kind of any of the other securities that you have in your 30s and 40s and 50s. Thanks for sharing that perspective. And I think it is important, as you said, not to jump to those conclusions. I do know myself from raising two kids

that I think we are facing an extreme rise in what, whether you call it effortless perfection or achievement culture that Jennifer Brahimi Wallace recently had a book out about that kids are putting more and more pressure on themselves because they feel that they need to in order to achieve this greatness that they're striving for. And I know one of the things that you talked about earlier was intervention, which is a core part of your books. You call it growth mindset intervention and that you talk about the interventions that you're doing

to reduce racial, social, economic, or achievement gaps. When it comes to what I was talking about with this effortless perfection or this high achievement type culture, how can you use a growth mindset intervention particularly to help students who are experiencing this? That's interesting. I just spent a long time talking with a bunch

of college varsity head coaches last few days. They're dealing with a college athletics landscape in which the top athletes have a kind of free agent market and they can switch around to whatever university they want to go to. And often the universities are offering different financial deals, NIL, name image likeness, so they're able to, there's real financial stakes in addition to the education they're getting to making out on certain teams, having certain exposure, et cetera. And there's a real concern that the next generation is hyper focused on optimal performance in whatever domain, in their case, volleyball or lacrosse

or diving, but incapable of dealing with the pressure that comes from that. And I think that's a, obviously a legitimate concern. If college coaches are needing to employ kind of mental health counselors at a rate that they haven't before, that's a sign that there's a real issue here. I think that the important thing to acknowledge is that young people's concern for their striving and their performance and optimizing that is not coming in a vacuum. There's a kind of macroeconomic argument that a lot of sociologists have made and some economists that the premium on advanced skills,

let's say a college degree or a master's or a PhD, like the wage premium, so the extent to which your lifetime wages depend on the quality and duration of your education and training, that premium has never been higher, right? So the payoff of a college degree is higher now than ever. Now, a lot of people like to bash college these days and say, well, I don't need a college degree

to go be an influencer on TikTok or whatever. And we need more welding programs, et cetera. But people have looked at a lot of those data and you can think of higher education as a hedge against the floor and less of a guarantee of a very high position in terms of your earning and your wages and your income. But no matter how you look at it,

the payoff of higher education is greater than ever before, which is not something people are unaware of. So young people and especially their parents increasingly understand that fact. And so they make decisions or they're pressured to make decisions at a young age with that in mind. And so anything that gives you an edge in the college admissions process basically is what I'm saying becomes kind of life or death high stakes competition at an earlier and earlier age. So that might be youth sports

which have become hyper specialized, right? There's a decline in rec league participation and a major increase in travel team participation for many of the college going sports. And the reason why Michael Lewis writes about this in one of his recent books is that people know it's easier to get admitted to Duke because you're a great lacrosse player than it is just on the merits of your academics because there are easier to find spots for partial scholarships on the sport than there are for just pure merit. Because so much of it is a crap shoot.

And so that creates like a lot of that economic reality creates a lot of stress for young people. A lot of parents then make that worse, right? Because they are yelling at kids in sixth grade, you need to take practice seriously because if you don't, you'll never get looked at by scouts. And that's just for admission to regular college, usually with no scholarship. And then you add on top of that, the chance to be a gymnast who can have a huge following online and make lots of money selling green juice or whatever the products are, then it creates a kind of economy in which there's a lot of pressure. And I think that's the negative side of it. Where does the distress come from? Well, we know from psychological perspective, one thing that makes you feel

the worst is social comparison. So anytime you have something that's good, but somebody else who you think is like you has something a little bit better, then that tends to decrease your enjoyment of whatever it is that you have. And so the classic example is a lottery winner who wins a $2 million ticket, but here's about someone who had a $2 million ticket, but here's about someone who had a $20 million ticket. So they're unhappy with their $2 million in winnings. Right. So this is Dan Gilbert research from 20, 30 years ago. And you can think of that

social comparison process happening at a more rapid rate than maybe ever before, in part due to the access, the internal lives of successful people through social media and the news and just the intrusion of cameras and recordings into the daily lives of the wealthy and successful. So social comparison, I think, is a big part of it. And that's a tricky one. So I think that for a lot of people who, young people who want to give up technology, I think a big part of it is they feel like they're wasting too much of their time comparing themselves to people

they could never live up to. And that's killing their happiness. And I think they're right about that. Another thing is to say, all right, well, there you have a choice. You could say, well, this is all a dumb rat race that isn't going anywhere. And I'm being lied to by the grownups about how I should invest my time. And so I actually shouldn't be striving that it's all kind of a fake game. And you hear that a lot here at almost every level. I hear PhD students say that about academia and there is a back going back to Thoreau and Walden. There's a reason why that's a kind of American tradition of saying let's get away from the constant striving.

But there's another version of it, which is, all right, well, the reason I'm striving is because I have a purpose and it's not just about me and my economic future. There's also something that I might be able to change and improve around the world. And my skills are gonna be valuable and essential for that. And I think a lot of people who have a positive stress response, it's coming from their belief that their striving has a value and a purpose that's bigger than their own long term self interest. of the argument I've laid out so far that makes stress seem inevitable and depression and so on seem inevitable is that some of the most meaningful things that bring the most enjoyment to our lives

are also the hardest. And the reason why they're so meaningful is because if you can accomplish them then you've stood out in some way. You've gained a reputation as someone who has something to add, some value to the world. And that feels amazing. The idea of earning some valuable prestige and reputation is among the best feelings in the world for anyone, let alone for a young person who doesn't have much of a reputation to stand on. And so the interventions that we often do are less

about escapism, right? Or suppression. So we're not saying give up on all your challenges or you're fine, just suck it up. We're not saying discard challenges or suppress negative emotion. Instead, we're usually recommending what's called reappraisal, which James Gross's term is very simply like reframing, in this case, a negative emotion like stress as an opportunity to A, do something that matters to you, B, as a sign that you care enough about something that you're willing to strive for it, And C, maybe even that stress is a resource that you can use. And so we've published a series of experiments

where with young people, even in the middle of the pandemic, they were more likely to show better stress responses in their cortisol and their heart rates, not heart rate, but just their cardiovascular system, heart rate among the factors that goes into that. But in general, show better bodily stress responses, better psychological stress responses, lower anxiety, and ultimately higher pass rates in school. When they've negative stresses as

a positive sign that they're doing something important, as a sign that they can grow and learn, that's the growth mindset. And also as a resource that when, for instance, your heart is pumping blood through your body or your heart rate's going crazy, it's actually getting more oxygen to your neurons and to your muscles to help you perform better. Well, David, thank you for explaining all that. And as I was going through the book,

one of the core concepts that you go into after you've gone through the background that we just went through is this whole concept of the mentor mindset. How does a mentor mindset differ from the more traditional approaches to mentoring young people that we may be familiar with? Yeah, so we came with this idea of the mental mindset after saying, all right, well, if you take all the stuff I just told you about what it would be good for a young person to know about themselves and to help them cope with the stresses of the world, then the question is, all right, what kind of leader do they need to get them there, to help them view a stressor as an opportunity, to help them have optimism in the face of difficulty, et cetera. And the most obvious thing based on the previous literature

would be to say, all right, well, the leader needs a growth mindset. But Carol Dweck and I looked at a lot of the data on leaders' own personal mindsets. And what we found, along with Mary Murphy and others, was that the extent to which the leader believed in a growth mindset on their own, so in that case, it would be, I'm a teacher, for instance, and I think my students can get

better at math, as opposed to I've got some super talented students and other non-talented students would be a fixed mindset. The extent to which a teacher in that case believed a growth mindset doesn't necessarily translate into the student feeling and experiencing the growth mindset culture. And a reason why was because you could think students

could grow and learn, but you could have the wrong theory, like intuitive lay theory in your mind, about how to accomplish that growth. One kind of wrong lay theory is what we call an enforcer mindset. This is the idea that young people are fundamentally like undisciplined and there are risks to themselves and into society.

This is the kind of grows from this view that teenagers lack a prefrontal cortex and they're going to follow their impulsive wins for whatever short-term pleasure that they can dream up. If that's your view you might think yeah sure you could grow and learn but the only way you're going to grow and learn is if I impose strict discipline to stop your kind of impulsive teenage brain from pulling you in a million directions. And so that enforcer mindset. Indirectly leads to a fixed mindset culture, because you sit there thinking, all right, well, if I don't control everything you're doing, you're going to get out of control, or take advantage of me, the first opportunity. And so you adopt this kind of authoritarian stance.

And practically in a, let's say in a classroom what that looks like is a teacher might assign relatively impossible work, and then provide you with no support or no flexibility to do the work. And you're supposed to learn the hard lesson that you have to use self-control. That's what teachers say that in their minds. But students perceive it as, all right, well, this is impossible and my teacher's not helping me accomplish it. Therefore, they're trying to sort me out of the class. And that's experience as fixed mindset to the kids. So one kind of wrong attitude is this enforcer mindset idea that we've seen again and again.

And importantly, you can have an enforcer mindset and still care about kids because you just think that's what they need. That's the way to overcome their impulsiveness and immaturity. A second intuitive but wrong idea is what we call a protector mindset. And this is the idea that young people today are so overloaded with stress and worry and trauma, et cetera, that we can't possibly expect very much of them.

And because we can't expect very much of them, then if I care about young people, I need to lower standards. Because if I maintain high standards, they're going to lose confidence. They're going to wither away and feel less and less like they can do anything, and their stress will overwhelm them. And so again, you might say, sure, a kid could learn, I have a growth mindset about them, I have a growth mindset about them, but they can't learn like the hardest stuff because if they try to, they're going to lose it. They're going to they're going to crumble like a house of cards. The protector mindset also prevents a teacher's growth mindset from translating into a real growth mindset culture. And it does so because teachers are very friendly and supportive, but have very

low standards. Now, what's interesting, what kind of no one had figured out before we did this work, is that those are two very different ways to have a fixed mindset culture. One is very high standards, very low support. The other is very high support, very low standards. And with enforcer being the former, protector being the latter. But both end up kind of implying a fixed mindset culture to a young person, whether it's a manager, a boss, a teacher, a professor, parent. So the alternative to both of those is to have very high standards, very high support. And that's what we call a mentor mindset. is to have very high standards, very high support. And that's what we call a mentor mindset.

And that ends up communicating authentically a growth mindset to young people in a mentor mindset. Your basic idea is that young people aren't incompetent. So they're not incapable of using self-control and they're also not incapable of managing stress, which in that belief in young people's competence, therefore undermines the most problematic belief that's underlying the enforcer and protector mindsets.

But, and so not only do you think in a mental mindset, hey, young people can do great stuff, but also they can do it if they have the appropriate supports. And oftentimes those supports are me and my relationship with them. But it's also what are the policies around learning from mistakes and being able to improve things and how you can come to me for help. So we discovered really through a long process of argumentation and looking at inconsistent data and studies that kind of didn't line up. And then finally we had this aha moment that if you want to be a leader that creates a growth mindset culture, what you need is this enforcer mindset. Sorry, this mentor mindset that's high standards high support that pushes back against the classic enforcer mindset and the classic protector mindset. I'm going to jump to chapter four, where I think you have some great

illustrations of moving away from this enforcer mindset. And I'm picking this on purpose because I'm going to talk about Steph Akamoto, who you have focused here. And for me, this is a firsthand experience because I have met Steve Bomber multiple times during my career. The first time was when I was at Lowe's and I was in charge of all software development. And he came to Lowe's for a meeting with myself and our CIO because at the time we were the only retailer of our scale in the entire United States

who wasn't running their point of sale systems on Microsoft and he wanted to understand why. And I remember Steve is a big guy and I remember him coming into this room and he tried at the Lowe's headquarters to use intimidation to get us to change our strategy and to buy a Windows operating system. And we stood our ground

because the reason we were running a Unix operating system was because Windows was crashing all the time at all the other retailers. And we had the most stable point of sale environment of any retailer. But I remember how upset he was when we refused to entertain his thoughts, plus the costs were going to be exorbitant. The next time I met him was when I was a senior executive at Dell.

And I remember I was working for the president of consumer at the time, Ron Garregs, and we were working on the rollout of what could have been a very successful launch of Dell's mobile products. And we wanted to go on the Android. We had the option of going Windows, but we knew it really wasn't an option because at that time, 2009, 2010, Microsoft was having a lot of difficulties penetrating the mobile market. So we had all our plans to go on Android. He comes out to visit us and in a meeting with the executives that I observed, again went total screaming machine,

basically tossing things around, talking about what would happen if we didn't go with the Microsoft product. And then he had a private meeting with Michael and that's what ended up happening. So that was my second interaction with them. And then the third was, as I was leaving Dell, he requested that I

interviewed to become the CIO at Microsoft. And so I went there and did probably 14 interviews of the company. And this was around 2011, 2012. And it was just such a toxic culture. Everyone was afraid, especially the younger employees. And that's what you describe in this chapter. And I was hoping maybe you can take it from that background and what Steph was experiencing to what ended up happening

when Satya Nadella came in, which is, I think we will look back in business schools and say it's one of the most impressive turnarounds that there's ever been. Well, first of all, I'm glad you weren't like, I read this chapter and I thought Balmer was a sweet peach and he was always the kindest person ever. Because I interviewed a ton of people, but you never know exactly if you're getting the full story. He's just reassuring that my reporting matches with your observations. And look, I'm not trying to demonize any one individual

leader. And obviously, my presumption trying to demonize any one individual leader. And obviously, my presumption after having talked to lots of people is that Bomber used the approach that he thought was going to be most effective on behalf of his company, that he was trying to do the right thing, and so on. And what I argue in the book is that, look, there's a worldview in which that bull in the china shop approach is the unfortunate but necessary reality that if you fundamentally believe that all business is a kind of dog eat dog, roofless, winner take all type of environment,

and furthermore, that anyone who isn't on board with your vision for whatever is happening is in some way short-sighted. Like they just simply don't see reality, but reality clearly, or if not short-sighted, actively thwarting your vision of the world. If you think that's the only reason why someone wouldn't use your product or go along with you as the manager, then it makes sense to intimidate them if you have the power to be the alpha dog. So what I try to do in the book is to go away from the conventional business pop psychology book where someone's got a pet theory and then you just find one exemplar and you're like, see, this proves my pet theory,

to instead say, what if Balmer himself is actually the product of a worldview that he didn't realize was only one of several ways of viewing the world? And once you think of it that way, then it's, oh, huh, maybe I as a manager in sharing in themer worldview, and I could have been Balmer too. Right? Because now you look at 2024, you can look back on some of the things he did and say, that's barbaric. I can't believe that HR let him get away with this stuff. And some of the stories I heard are young employees, especially engineers in the early

2000s, coming into a meeting, talking about a product, maybe the predecessor to the Zoom or the early Windows smartphones. And then they would just get berated and yelled at for not knowing the answers to whatever questions the executives had. And the term I heard from a lot of people was flipping tables. That there were more than one occasion

in which a table was literally flipped over by an executive during a pitch meeting or a proposal meeting from a young person, especially young engineers. And the idea of course, was the leaders are saying, the work's not good enough, it's not to our standard, and you need to be afraid enough of disappointing us that next time you actually meet our standard. Right. And you can see why people do that's why parents yell at their kids and teachers threaten to send kids to the principal.

It's a reasonable tool of control that has been around us throughout all of human history is yelling, telling, blaming and shaming right flipping tables mad. And it's meant to be a deterrent for poor performance. And what I want to argue and what I try to do with the story of Steph is to say, well, that comes from a specific worldview that doesn't have to be everyone's worldview. And so just to get back to that point, let me just back up and tell you who Steph is. So Steph Akimoto is many people would consider Microsoft's best manager over a long period of time. She was recently plucked away by ServiceNow and owns Manager Excellence at ServiceNow, a large technology company as well. But when she was hired at Microsoft around 2000,

around the time that Bomber and his culture was starting to take over, she was disgusted by all the toxicity. And she encountered this flipping tables culture and also encountered a management philosophy that's been called Rank and Yank that comes from General Electric GE during the Jack Welch era. And for younger listeners who maybe don't know Jack Welch, but maybe have watched 30 Rock, Alec Baldwin's character is meant to be a caricature

of Jack Welch and his personality and from the Tina Fey show 30 Rock. So Jack Welch was well known for this policy called rank and yank. And the basic idea is that every six months or a year, all the employees in different units would be ranked compared to similar units. And then some bottom proportion, let's call it bottom 20%, bottom 25% would be either fired or given a warning that they're going to be fired next time that they're in that bottom proportion. The highest group that might

be five, might be 10%, depending on how they did it in a given year, would be given a lavish bonus or reward. And the middle group was given very little and basically told if you're not on the path to being in the top, that eventually you're going to be in the bottom. And this sounds meritocratic, sounds like, all right, well, it's a business, you got to reward the best people. But when it ended up happening is that, like in Steph's case, her unit was overperforming compared to any other unit, because she was an excellent manager. And she was in the software testing division.

And they might be ranked compared to somebody else who's in an entirely different division, but just conceptually grouped together. And then her group of over-performers would have to be ranked compared to other groups that in generally were worse. And so some of her people would be told, hey, you're in the bottom 25%, whereas in other groups, neighboring groups,

they would end up with a lot of people who'd be told they're top performers when they're actually not as good as Steph's worst people. And so that created a sense of injustice in her mind and actually in the minds of lots of other managers who've been interviewed over the years. And the wide-scale effect of this was not, it turns out, to motivate great performance. What ended up happening instead is that within groups that were ranked compared to each other, employees started withholding information, sabotaging each other's products, being duplicitous, lying to people about how good their presentations were, hoping that they would get yelled at and get table

flipped whenever they presented. So that way you could end up ranked higher than this other person and get the better bonus. And also in that era of Rankin-Yank, you have enduring kind of public failures like the Zune or Bing. Whereas a lot of the best engineers were going over to Google where they could ride a scooter and get free M&Ms and oddwalla juice all day. So it was just this lost decade, it's been called by Vanity Fair, where the top talent in engineering ended up going to fun places like Google, that different kinds of cultures and leaving Microsoft. What's interesting is that Steph's reaction to this initially was to overcompensate. And I asked Steph, who again is one of Microsoft's best managers, and I was like, what's the rookie mistake you made early on? And she said it was trying to

become more friendly with my employees and let them know that I cared. And I did that by not constantly critiquing their work, which sounds reasonable from a certain perspective. But what ended up happening is some of her direct reports who she really cared, ended up being surprised by their poor performance evaluations and then getting blindsided and getting put in the potential fireable category for rank in the Yank. It's called stack ranking.

And that ultimately harmed their careers. So she ended up harming people she cared about rather than protecting them. And so Steph adopted a very kind of like brutally honest style about performance, but it always centered on, first of all, a care for the person and their contribution. And second of all, a path to increasing their promotional velocity.

So a good example is if she had an employee that might be underperforming, where she knows they're gonna be potentially put in the bottom category, she would have a conversation saying, all right, well, we can't control the last quarter or the last two quarters, but you can control your narrative going forward. So what's something above and beyond that you would like to do where you might have to learn a new skill and push yourself where six months from now on your performance review, we can say, A, you turned it around, but B, you're one of the top performers in the whole unit. And so they would collaboratively create a plan for doing something impressive.

So in the software testing team, it might be going over and actually talking to the engineers. And rather than just waiting on some report that goes to the engineers saying this feature doesn't work, instead saying, all right, well, let's fix this feature now proactively ahead of time before it ships to clients. So that way there's a better user experience. And now as a manager, Steph can tell someone to do that, but that person might feel that's impossible because the engineers are going to hate me. They're not going to listen to the testing group. So Steph would use all of her power and influence to basically protect the young person's right to go have that conversation where they could then earn the reputation as someone who's

being super proactive on behalf of the customer and the product by working with the engineers. She would never have the conversation for the employee, but she would talk to the engineering manager and say, hey, let my person come talk to your engineers. So it's like permission to be in the room to earn a high status reputation was a big part of what she did. She called it basic blocking and tackling. So this happens throughout the first decade of the 2000s. And then when Bomber steps down early in the second decade of 2000s and Satya Nadella takes over, he very quickly realized that there was this toxic culture. And Mary's written about this too, but in his book, he said, we had a bunch of know-it-alls

and what we really needed was a bunch of learn-it-alls. So being willing to learn anything and improve. And so Satya brought in some great people, Kathleen Hogan and others, and they said, we want a new culture in the organization. But what they quickly realized was that you can't just declare by fiat that you have a growth mindset culture, right? Because a lot of people will interpret the stereotype of growth mindset of just telling you to try harder, and they won't authentically create that culture. The other big part of the problem is that it's like

our old growth mindset in school problem with Carol and I and our national experiments. A kid could have a growth mindset about their own ability, but if the teacher creates a toxic fixed mindset classroom, where the math teacher is like, all right, half of you don't have the talent to be AP students, so I'm not going to teach you. If that's the culture, then the kids not going to really profit from their growth mindset. Something similar could be said of managers in their direct reports, especially young employees. So they, Nadella and his team quickly realized you can't just hire for growth mindset in the young engineers and then set them up

with a manager who has been given financial rewards for 20 years by being the most toxic and monstrous fixed mindset leader. You need somehow a training program and an incentive scheme and an evaluation program for the managers that helped them create a growth mindset culture also. And so they came up with this idea of model coach care.

So the manager needs to model the work. They need to coach someone rather, so not the kind of coach that, not the Belichick that's your bad, I'm cutting you. It's more like the shooting coach that helps you improve your technique over time. And then Steph was the main proponent internally for this word care. And you can just imagine a bunch of table flipping bomber people saying care like that's nonsense. We're not going to beat Apple by caring about people Steve Jobs didn't care about anybody he just stared them in the eyes until they wilted and did what he said. And so that's what we're going to do. But Steph was very adamant that care just care doesn't mean low standards.

She had learned from her early experiences. Care means I care enough about you that I'm going to tell you proactively where you can improve and do basic blocking and tackling. So that way you can go out and earn a reputation as someone that goes above and beyond. So she defined care in this mentor mindset way and that became the core philosophy. That's one all these were awards for the best management philosophy and in technology recently. And then by its peak and stuff among many many others, were a part of this.

She would never take all the credit for it. She would take credit for what she did, but she would never say she did it all. But by the end of this transformation, they were the number one employee for young people better even than Google. So it really was a big flip and it's very impressive. It's pretty incredible. They went from a decade before Satya joined where none of the talent from Silicon Valley

wanted anything to do with Microsoft to now, it's again the hottest place for people to work. Totally, so many people going there. And I've experienced the stack ranking myself. We had it at both Lowe's and then Dell. Michael was also a keen observer of what Jack Welch did and he even brought in our chief financial officer from GE who really brought in a lot of the practices

and part of what I observed when I was there is we were trying to reinvent the company, invoke a lot of change. And what ended up happening was with this force ranking, if you fell in the bottom 15%, you basically were losing your job. And so many of the long tenured employees were at that point in senior leadership positions that they were taking care of their own. And so people who were really hindering us from moving forward were being protected in this stack ranking and people who were being brought in from the outside to try to bring the new change in and add new perspectives

were stack ranked very low and forced out. In fact, when I was there, the average tenure of a new vice president was under six months. And it just made for a very difficult environment to try to alter because of the mechanics and how it was set up. Appreciate what you're saying. It's a whole philosophy. And first of all, that's super interesting.

And I have a thousand questions for you, but I often think about the stories my dad would tell about being at the University of Texas, where I'm now a professor, in the 1970s. And he was a science major. And so he would take bio, biogenic, organic chemistry, and it might start with a hundred students. And he might have, and they would grade everything on the curve. So he might have an A on the first two exams, but those students who got C's, D's, and F's would drop the class

and every single test they would lose more and more students who are CDF and then redo the curve. So by the end he would be one of the top 15 out of a hundred, but he would have a C and because he's always you're moving farther and farther down the rank. And by the end, he's like, maybe I'm just dumb at science, but it's, you're the top 15% of science students at a top university, you're not dumb at science. And that's something similar that happened in a lot of these companies that copied the Jack Welch approach. It's like optimizing for the top one or 2% that are ridiculous superstars. But if you have 180,000 employees, it's

not clear that's the best way to run your company. And then over time, it can end up being pretty toxic and undermine things. Absolutely. Well, David, I just wanted to quickly go through section two of your book, you go into mindset mentor practices such as transparency, questioning, stress, purpose, and belonging. And I was hoping you could quickly just walk through all five in a succinct way to give the audience an understanding of how the mentor mindset attacks each one of these. So first of all, thanks. I love the opportunity to go through this. And I

will keep it short in terms of, all right, well, what does the public think each of these means? And what does it actually mean to do them? So the whole second half of the book revolves around the idea that as I was telling people about this mentor mindset framework, people like Steph and other great teachers that I write about and parents and so on. They'd say, all right, well, but maybe these managers and teachers and parents are just preternaturally disposed to being outrageously great at mentorship and leadership. Maybe they're like Athena from the Odyssey, where they just spring forth from Zeus's skull and then become capital M mentor that spends 20 years

with Telemachus and helps him along his way. And I can't be that because I have other stuff going on. That's the main response I often get. And what I found is that actually, no, there's concrete stuff that all these mentor mindset exemplars do and that anyone else can do. And so if you're a mentee listening to this or watching this, these are things you can look for as you decide who do I want to be my manager or my mentor. And if you're a mentor, these are things where it's like, all right, I don't have to be the Greek goddess of wisdom to

be a good mentor. Here are some concrete things I can start doing right now and they can have an impact. The first of them ordered in the book is transparency. And the idea there is you just need to explain what you're doing, basically your standards and your high support, a little bit more than you think you need to. The reason why it's pretty simple, if you assume young people are mostly talked down to that they're grown, explained all this information all the time, then they're coming to our relationships with them with baggage. And they're going to presume the worst of us as leaders unless we're super transparent about what we're doing and why. So maybe you're already a leader that tries to have high standards and high

support, but what the person is seeing, what the mentee is seeing is just our high standards. The first practice is just to explain, hey, I'm providing you this feedback, for instance, because I have very high standards and I believe that you can meet them. Anyone can do that. You can do it with just a few words. Make it a habit. The rule of thumb is, say something transparent about your intentions about three times more than you think you need to say it. The second one is questioning. So one thing I saw a lot is that mentors are very tempted to explain everything.

Again, I use this word grown explaining. The idea is that I, the 30 or 40 year old have thought through what's good for your future. And if only you would listen to me, then you would make wise choices, right? It's like middle school health class. And that's our default approach for working with young people. When you look at the great mentors, the great exemplars I've found, they ask questions three to four times more than they tell information.

So great mentor mindset teachers, the kid says, hey, is this problem right? They say things like, I don't know, is it? And insecure mentors like, yes, it is great, good job, way to go, you tried hard. The great mentor mindset exemplars hardly ever provide direct feedback and they hardly ever praise for getting right answers or even for effort. It's almost always questioning to put the impetus back

on the young person to do the thinking. The great basketball coach I followed, Chip England, isn't telling you how to fix your shot when he's fixing Steve Kerr's shot. He's not just telling you. He's asking, he's like, how did that feel? What went wrong for you there? He's making the player have a coach in their head. So questioning is a second practice and there's some very specific routines that I've seen work and that anyone can do. Next is stress. So suppose you're in a world in which you're pushing people to their limits and they're going beyond what they thought they were capable of. Well, they're going to feel some stress. And in our society, the normal message around stress is give up on that. Don't do it. As I was saying earlier in this interview. And that

worldview that Ali Crum calls stress is debilitating ends up being pretty bad for young people. It can make the stress worse. It can also prevent them from leveling up their skills. So the very simple practice is to use what we call the stress can be enhancing mindset that Ali Crm initially developed. She's a Stanford professor. And I, along with my collaborator, Jeremy Jamieson, who's at Rochester, and Chris Bryan is at UT, we developed a mindset intervention

that combines growth mindset. So your difficulties now can grow and change with stress can be enhancing. And when you embrace those difficulties and feel stressed, that stress is helping you. And so we have some very specific language that any leader can use to echo those messages of growth mindset and stress can be enhancing.

The last two things I'll just say briefly are about belonging and purpose. These are big concepts that can feel ephemeral and hard to pin down. What I talk about in the book is that expert mentor mindset leaders have developed routines for in the case of belonging, helping you tell a story to yourself about how early difficulties don't mean you don't belong, but instead are a means through which you create belonging. So they help you reframe social difficulties as a route to belonging.

And with purpose, the big trick is to get young people to think beyond their narrow, short-term self-interest or even their long-term self-interest and think about how any striving now, even any stress and frustration now, is you doing your part to help build skills that help you make a difference in the world beyond yourself. The purpose chapter gives a set of routines and stories and studies about how impactful

it can be to help a young person move from a world in which anything hard now is simply a sacrifice for good things in the long term future to instead think that difficulties now are a sign that I'm doing something meaningful and purposeful, that they're part of my passion for the future and that they have implications beyond myself. So each one also has stories from real leaders who've tried to implement this, people who've struggled to implement this, why was it hard for them?

And also how the mentor mindset fits in with each of these ideas and helps us to continue to use these practices in our daily routines over time. Thank you for sharing that, David. My last question for you would be, how do you hope your book will help build a better future, especially for adolescents and the next frontier of adolescent psychology and motivation research? I think that the book really comes from an acknowledgement that it's a time of crisis

for a lot of people. They feel like, most people believe the young and the next generation will shape our future, but that terrifies most people. It makes us feel uncertain and afraid that what the media would tell us is a screwed up generation is soon gonna be in charge, right? You even see people calling for an increase in the voting age, like these young people today get offended over everything, we can't let them vote like we used to.

And I think what I really want is for us to move out of a world where we are fearing the craziness that puberty and hormones cause in the brain, and instead start harnessing whatever energy young people bring with them for the betterment of society and for the betterment of young people's lives. And I think that the pro-social argument is that look, the number and influence of young people is continuing to grow, not just in our world, but also in the global south, very soon 60% of all young people will live in the global south, right? So India, Sub-Saharan Africa, Pakistan, etc. Are we creating a future in which they think it's worth it to sacrifice now for the sake of their well-being later? Do they think there's a future worth saving? And if we don't create that feeling and perception as adults, then we're going to have a lot

of young people that are going to turn to more extreme means of asserting their voice and autonomy. And so I think it's actually pretty urgent from a global perspective that we learn how to use the mentor mindset to create a better world for them that they then perceive as more fair and just and worth investing in. But the last thing is just simply our self-interest as leaders, certainly for me as a parent of four, I am constantly humbled by how hard it is

to reach young people as a baseball coach, right? And the hardest thing I've ever done is coach nine to 12 year olds play baseball. And if I had my kids, my students, my players, listen to twice as much of what I've said to them, my life would be so much more efficient. It'd be more gratifying. So I want to give that sense of efficacy to any adult out there who cares about the next

generation. And then the related point is the feeling of satisfaction of knowing that something you've done has improved the world in the future. And this is what I'll end on. There's almost nothing more fun than having a young person who you've mentored in a big or small way go on to be super successful. Not because we wanna steal credit for what they've done,

but it's almost like when an engineer builds an amazing building or bridge, every time you drive past it, you're just like, I built something that stood the test of time, that people are using that they're loving, and that feels amazing. I just think a lot of us would feel more fulfilled and happier if we more often had that experience of, maybe I only talked to this new hire for 45 minutes, and happier if we more often had that experience of, maybe I only talked to this new hire for 45 minutes, but I think I said something to them

that's gonna stick with them. Or I might've only had this kid in my class for one year, but they're gonna be different because of that. And that's just a lot of fun. It's thrilling. And it's one of the best parts about being human is we live in this social context where we get to influence influence people's lives and I want more people to have that experience because they read the book Well david, thank you so much for that and where is the best place for people to learn more about you if they would like to

Well, so I direct the texas behavioral science and Institute, and we are an R&D institute. We do lots of work on improving pathways for young people into the workforce and the higher ed. So a lot of our resources are available for free on that website. And then for people who want me to come speak, I'm booked by a group called LAVN, L-A-V-I-N. So you can just Google me and LAVN agency and they handle all my bookings and which talks that I like to give. and also just check out the book. I put, I poured everything I know into it.

Really would love people check it out through Simon and Schuster or Amazon or wherever else you get your books. Well, David, thank you so much for joining us today. It was such an honor to have you. And I know the audience is going to really resonate with this episode. Great. Thanks a lot. And I'd love to stay in touch with any listeners and see how else I can be a resource for their work. I thoroughly enjoyed that interview with Dr. David Yeager. And I wanted to thank my friend, Katie Milkman, Simon Schuster, and David for the honor and privilege of joining us on today's show. Links to all things David will

be in the show notes at passionstruck.com. use our website links if you purchase any of the books from the guests that we feature here on the show you can also catch all our episodes on YouTube at both our main channel John R. Miles where we post long form interviews and our clips channel passion struck clips where we post two to eight minute clips from these long form interviews go there subscribe and join over a quarter million other subscribers. Advertiser deals and discount codes are in one convenient place at passionstruck.com deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show. If you're looking for daily dose of inspiration, then join me on all the socials at John R. Miles. And if you want to expand your courage muscles, then sign up for our weekly newsletter, Live Intentionally, where each week

we curate a custom challenge based on the previous week's episodes. If you're interested in finding out where you stand on the continuum to becoming passion-struck, then sign up for our Passion Struck Quiz on passionstruck.com. It's based on the principles from my book Passion Struck. It takes about 10 minutes to complete, and it will show you where your starting point is on your path to becoming passion struck. Take the quiz today. Before we wrap up, I am so excited to share a sneak peek of our next episode of the passion struck podcast. I'll be joined by Lauren Handel-Zander, founder and CEO of the Handel Group and creator of

the Handel Method and Inner U. Known for transforming the lives of clients like Hugh Jackman quest love as well as top executives. Lauren is a master life coach who helps people cut through their excuses and take radical accountability over their lives. In this episode, we dive deep into how to shift your internal dialogue, make better choices and align your actions with your deepest desires. If you're ready to take control and dream bigger, don't miss this fascinating conversation with Lauren Zander on the Passion Struck podcast. When you design your day,

you're not just doing a to-do list or what's gonna happen. It's an outcome for what you're up to and your intention written out for the day. The concept really is that if you tell yourself from your higher selves, what you want to have happen each day, it's like directing your subconscious.

And it's a profound way to keep a record of your own life and then design your day so that you're not just doing whatever you're doing. It's way more being connected to what you're doing. The fee for the show is that you share it with family or friends when you find something useful or interesting.

If you know someone who would be interested in the motivation behind 10 to 25 year olds, then definitely share this episode with David Yeager or with them. The biggest compliment that you can give us is to share the show with those that you love and care about. In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so that you can live

what you listen. Until next time, go out there and become passion strut.