Plain English with Derek Thompson - The Science of Achievement, With Adam Grant

Episode Date: October 27, 2023

Today, we’re taking a break from war to talk about the science of human potential and a new book on that subject from the psychologist and bestselling author Adam Grant. In 'Hidden Potential,' Grant shares stories and studies across sports, religious history, coaching, and economics to explain why we're bad at cultivating our own potential and identifying ability in others. We talk about education and affirmative action, scouting quarterbacks, coaching Steph Curry, and, for reasons that will soon become apparent, the spread of Protestantism. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [e-mail].  Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Adam Grant Producer: Devon Manze Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Today, we're taking a break from war to talk about the science of human potential and a new book on that subject from the psychologist and best-selling author, Adam Grant. Let me set us up this way. Imagine you're a basketball coach. Maybe it's a middle school girls team, high school boys team, NBA team doesn't matter for the purposes of this story. Just choose whatever scenario sits best with you. Let's say you have a dilemma.

You have one star player, one clearly superior basketball player. And after that, you've got a bunch of relatively similar role players in the team. You want to win the championship. What as a coach do you do with this team? Well, the smack you over the head obvious answer is that you coach the team to support the star. Of course, you do this. You're only going as far as the star will take you. So you run a bunch of plays that lift up the star player.

you do everything you can to preserve the health of the star player, you recognize correctly that the star is what is going to take you the furthest. Here's a crazy idea. The crazy idea is that you send the star player home. Not for a day, not for a week, maybe for a whole month. You grab this keystone of the team and you rip it out. This seems to make no sense whatsoever. It would imply that, for example, if you really loved

a basketball team, you should actively root for brief injuries to your best players. You would never do this. But in fact, there is some evidence that this is exactly what you should root for. In 2015, two researchers from the University of Florida and the Stevens Institute of Technology studied 28,000 NBA games, and they noted when the best player was injured or absent from the team. and they found that when the star players missed a brief amount of time to injury or other absences about say 13 games out of an NBA season so maybe just about 20% of the season if they missed this amount of time the team played better overall after they returned it was almost as if the injury to the star magically improved the team from that paper's

abstract, quote, a star's temporary absence helps the organization overcome myopia by triggering a search for new routines. When he returns, or she returns, the organization may combine these new routines with pre-absence routines to improve teamwork and performance. End quote. It's a little bit of, you know, psychology abstract mumbo-jumbo, but maybe as you heard that, as I read it, your mind started to buzz with implications that have nothing to do with basketball. Across every company, we all know there are stars, sometimes self-appointed stars, within teams. And it might seem to the non-stars in that team to seem scary to lose them, to sickness or injury or leave. But what the study suggests is that very often our own potential is constrained when we become reliant on the so-called star performers around us.

In fact, we become our best workers, our best selves, not when we rely on comfortable routines of dependency, but rather when something surprising shocks us to be better. This is just one study that I furiously underlined and looked up from Adam's very insightful book. And today we're going to talk about human potential and the science of human potential across sports, coaching, hiring, scouting. We're going to talk about why GPA isn't the best predictor of student achievement, why it's so hard to scout great quarterbacks, and what the spread of Protestantism tells us about human potential and plasticity. I'm Derek Thompson. This is plain English.

Adam Grant, welcome to the show. Thank you, Derek. I'm excited to be here. I'm excited to have you. You've written books about these big ideas, originality, general. generosity, curiosity. Each book of yours I've read not just as a story-filled how-to, but also as a kind of critique of some busted conventional wisdom in our culture. Like, nice guys finish last, nope. Changing your mind is a sign of weakness? No, that's wrong. So let's start there. What is the

cultural error? What is the busted conventional wisdom that hidden potential is responding to? I think there are two myths that I want to bust with this book broadly. One is that natural talent is the most important driver of success and growth. I don't believe it is, and I don't think the evidence supports that thesis. The second is that hard work is kind of the key ingredient after natural talent. And I don't think that's what we need to unlock our hidden potential either. I think, of course, effort is important. But what ultimately matters is not so much how hard you work is how well you learn.

So I have a meta question about this whole concept of potential. There are a lot of stories in this book about sports. And that's great because I love sports. And I love these stories. But I'm 5'8, 150 pounds. My basketball potential is not infinitely plastic. My potential as an NFL linebacker is not a matter of mere effort. Sometimes, if we're being honest, we really are bound by the outcome of genetic lottery.

But also, as so many of your story show and as so much of the literature in psychology and developmental psychology shows, we consistently, both as individuals and as society, underrate ambition, underrate our ability to change, to improve, to become excellent at things that we used to suck at. And I wonder, as someone who used to suck at diving and public speaking, who is now quite prolific at both of these things, or at least what was recently ended with diving, how do you reconcile these ideas, the force of genetics, but also the possibility of improvement? I actually think that sports examples don't help us here, because we're much less flexed. flexible and pliable physically than we are psychologically. So, like, yes, you know, there are

Steph Curry's and Tom Brady's who overcome the limitations of their bodies or find ways to repurpose some of their physical strengths to maybe compensate for their deficits. But when it comes to any skill you want to learn, that's, you know, that's not in sports, that's, you know, not dependent on, like basic, you know, raw physical talent, speed, you know, agility, strength, et cetera, it's much easier to mold yourself into something you're not. So, you know, I think about this, the contrast between getting good at diving and getting good at public speaking, massively different for me, right? Those are two things I started out terrible at, remarkably terrible.

I mean, you can watch the videos of me diving as a 13, 14-year-old. It's embarrassing. I was the worst diver on my team, and it was a miracle that my coach didn't cut me. And it took me years and years of pouring every ounce of my energy into diving, stretching, training on a trampoline, lifting weights, to get my body to a place where I could qualify for the Junior Olympic Nationals. And even then, after six years of diving being my obsession, I get to call me. college. And I'm completely out of my league because there are people who work just as hard as me and have springs in their legs and can actually, you know, touch their toes without bending their knees easily. You know, contrast that with getting better at public speaking where, you know,

I'm an introvert and I was also extremely shy. And I would shake getting on stage. And within a few weeks, the shaking started to dissipate. And within a few months, I stopped, like, breathing like Darth Vader all the time. And it was only, you know, an occasional blip. And it just, you know, it really speaks to the fact that I think that the skills around how we think and how we behave are much easier to learn than the ones that often put a real ceiling on our potential as athletes. I want to blow out this idea of potential and improvement by thinking about it at the biggest possible scale.

I'm interested in the concept of historical progress. You have tucked away on page 45 of this book, a study that blew my mind the first time that I saw it. It is a study by Sasha Becker and Ludger Westman about the Protestant Revolution and how the Protestant Revolution changed the course of history. get us started by telling us about this study. I'm going to make a faithful effort. It blew my mind too, honestly, Derek,

and I love that it struck a chord with you because one of the things I've always admired about your writing is the way that you connect the micro to the macro, and you dig deep into human psychology, but you also show us the broader social and political forces that are shaping collective progress.

And so this study, I feel like it was done for you in some ways. So, yes. So basically, this is a pair of economists, and they're interested in following up on Max Weber's insight that the Protestant Reformation essentially changed the world. And the Weber argument, which you know well and have written about, is that what Protestants brought us, what Martin Luther gave us in the 1500s, was a different work ethic. That before labor was kind of a vice, and now it's a virtue. You have a calling. And so people are going to become these extraordinary agents of grid and discipline and perseverance. And that's why the Protestant Reformation kind of fueled an

industrial revolution. That's why capitalism flourished. It was thanks to the work ethic that a religion gave us. And Becker investments say, not so much. We're not sure that that's false, but we don't think it's the only story. So they set out to track this. And the way they do it is they first show that sure enough, as Protestant beliefs start to sweep through different regions, you can actually see economic growth follow in those regions. You can even see it at the level of a whole country. But hard work was not necessarily the active ingredient there. Let me pick up the story here because I looked into the study. I looked deep into it. It's such an incredible idea. So backing up just a bit, one of Martin Luther's most important ideas was his doctrine of

Sola Scula, Scula only Scripura scripture, only scripture. That is, don't rely on the priest to build your relationship with God. Rely on yourself. Read the Bible for yourself. And the truth is, this was a ridiculous idea at the time. Because before the Protestant Revolution, barely 1% of the German-speaking population was literate. So telling them to read the Bible was initially utterly fruitless. But as towns and principalities throughout Europe adopted Protestantism, literacy grew in step with religious conversion. In fact, even in 1900, the most literate counties in Central Europe were also the most Protestant.

Now, this is where I think you, any other social, careful social scientist or a careful listener, maybe both, are going to throw up a huge red flag, and the words causation and correlation will be printed in big, bold letters on that flag. The question is, did Protestantism cause greater literacy in education, or were literate Christians just more likely to become Protestant? And this is the masterstroke of the study.

Sorry to sort of monologue here, but I find it so interesting. Protestantism started in Wittenberg, and it spread from Wittenberg. And the researchers find that the further, a Prussian county was from Wittenberg in 1871, the smaller, the percentage of Protestants, right? So Prussian counties closer to ground zero of the revolution had both higher shares of Protestants and higher literacy rates. So if you think of religious conversion, sort of radiating out from

Wittenberg, literacy seems to be radiating out as well, suggesting that it is, in fact, this religious conversion, this revolution that is causing the increase in literacy. And thus ends my monologue, but the reason that I wanted to go a little bit deeply into it is that I think this study is so important for anybody who is skeptical of the idea that progress can happen at the individual or social level. An idea, a mind virus of solacecriptura may have been a lever on an entire continent and maybe much of the world's ability to read. And that's just amazing to me. Yeah, it's remarkable. And maybe to build on that, the specific insight that really struck me was, wait. So what's happening when the Protestant Reformation takes hold is not necessarily just that

people are now called to work harder. It's that in order to be good Protestants, they have to learn to read because they need to learn to read the Bible. I guess in Catholicism, it was common for biblical teachings to be oral, but Protestants, good Protestants read, and that meant that entire generations learn to read. And as literacy rates rose, then their ability to learn rose with them. You don't just learn to read the Bible. You can learn to read everything. And now that you can learn to read anything, you can now absorb information and learn at a faster rate. And so the big aha I had here was that it's not necessarily the working harder effect. It's a working smarter effect here.

And that, you know, I guess for me, like this big movement toward Protestantism that in part may have had this side effect of teaching literacy, what it actually set the stage for was for human beings to become sponges to make us better at absorbing relevant information. at filtering out irrelevant information, at improving our critical thinking skills by confronting competing arguments in different sources of literature.

And yeah, that could shape a whole country and a whole generation. That's staggering to me. I want to spend the rest of our time talking about what, to me, feel like the two pillars of your book, which is, number one, cultivating our own potential, and number two, predicting success and potential in others.

like scouting or hiring. So let's first talk about cultivating our own potential. The thing that everybody knows is that practice makes perfect, like 10,000 hours, yada, yada, and so forth. But the truth is, practicing often sucks. Practicing something you are bad at is a pain in the butt. It's frustrating. It's often boring.

It's really hard. You have a great story for showing a theory that I think we should hold alongside the importance of practice. and it begins with a basketball coach named Brandon Payne. Who is Brandon Payne? Brandon Payne is a basketball player who did not make it as far as he wanted to go. And once, you know, he was a great shooter, basically, but he wasn't quick enough.

He didn't have the endurance. He didn't have the athleticism. And as he puts it, he did not work hard enough. to get where he wanted to go. So what do you do when you fail as an athlete? You become a coach or a trainer. And so Brandon hit his wall in college. He started training.

And then one day, he took on a client who was just doubted by so many scouts. They said that he lacked the quickness, he lacked the size, he lacked the strength to be a decent basketball player. And Brandon started training him, and a couple years later, his trainee, Steph Curry, is a back-to-back MVP. And one of the key lessons of your story of Brandon Payne and Steph Curry is this concept of deliberate play. And this really hit me because I've seen Steph Curry's pregame workouts and they're incredibly playful. He's always doing these circus shots or these dribbling drills that look like something out of the Harlem Globetrotters. Brandon Payne has this quote. He says, there's no boring.

in our workouts. Every drill is a game. End quote. Why is this concept of deliberate play, of turning practice into something a little bit more playful, so powerful? Well, I think it's important because as anyone who's ever put in long hours trying to master any skill knows, practice can become a slug. And there are, I think, two big risks that we run into when practice becomes repetitive or monotonous or just plain, difficult and strenuous. One is the obvious one, burnout. We all know people who have just gotten exhausted, you know, burning the midnight oil or, you know, just pounding the pavement. The other, though, that I think often happens first is boreout. This is an actual term in psychology

when, you know, instead of being overloaded, you're understimulated and you just don't have the interest and the motivation. So I think, you know, given the risk of burnout and bore out, what we don't want is, you know, to just commit ourselves to the daily grind. We want to try to turn the daily grind into a source of daily joy. And the way that psychologists do this is with what's called deliberate play, which is where you take a skill building activity and you break it down and add fun to it. And that's not, I do not want to suggest that we should just gamify. Like, no, I don't want a leaderboard. I don't, you know, I don't necessarily want you to be on your Peloton thinking, like, okay, you know, I've got to win this race.

What I want is to take the actual process of doing the task and building the skill and make it enjoyable. And we often do that by introducing autonomy and variety into the way that you do it. You introduced this term that I had not heard before from the psychological literature called interleaving, interleaving. That is like bouncing from one activity to another. So in basketball, it would be like doing a shooting drill. and then a dribbling drill and then a passing drill. Can you connect that to something in the workplace? Because I can see how interleaving works for athletes

that need to develop multiple discrete skills. But sometimes in the workforce, people are doing individual skills that are a little bit more complex. So how would interleaving as a principle apply to the modern workforce? Yeah, I mean, I will say, Derek, this was counterintuitive to me because I always thought you want to do reps

on the same skill over and over again until you've mastered it. and what the research shows is that not only is it more motivating to interleave and vary the skill moment to moment, you actually get deeper learning that way too. And I think that's in part because you have time to consolidate what you're learning. It's in part because if you practice a skill once and then you don't pick it up for 10 minutes, you have to then retrieve it again from memory. And there's a consolidation effect that happens there that sometimes makes you better at it. So interleaving is especially helpful if you're trying to work on complex skills. And you can

even break it down into multiple skills that are part of the same task. So let's say, for example, you are trying to improve your public speaking. This is something that I've spent a couple decades on now. You've spent a lot of time on as well. And everybody has to do it at some point in their job. So my inclination, like the reps approach, would be to say, okay, I'm trying to improve my pacing. Let me now do three or four talks where I work on. slowing down a little bit and lowering my voice when I'm making an important point. And then eventually, right, the audience will be entrained to that rhythm and I'll master it. And then in my next series of practice talks, what I'm going to focus on is I'm going to shift

to the structure of the content and making clear that I'm signposting effectively. Well, what the research suggests is that I should actually go back and forth between those two things. I should give one talk where I'm totally focused on structure, then the next talk, work on pacing, and then go back to structure, and that at the end of it, I'm going to be better at both. In the open, I mentioned another of my favorite studies from your book, which is the research that was done on 28,000 NBA games, which showed that basketball teams often improve if their stars are briefly injured. You point out in a very helpful footnote that there's sort of an optimal time off. the average team would need its star to play about 43 games after missing 15 games in the NBA,

so that's about half the season. What does this study tell us about the science of potential and improvement within teams? Well, you can see this in the NBA data and a little bit with hockey teams too, where what happens when a star player gets hurt is people have to reconfigure their roles and routines. So somebody who is a peripheral player now has to be more Central, somebody who may have had an unrecognized strength or an unused skill now brings it into the team. Suddenly you realize your center can dribble in basketball. You discover that your defenseman actually has a great slap shot.

And that just wasn't needed when the star was playing that role. So I think the lesson from that for all of us is that sometimes you actually need to remove your best player in order to elevate the team. And what that does is it helps you learn about the hidden potential in the other members of that team. I really wanted to name this. Like the same way Bill Simmons is famous for his concept of the Ewing theory, the idea that sometimes when the best player leaves a team, the entire team gets permanently better. I wanted if there was some way we could have a name for what happens when the best player goes away for a bit and then comes back and the entire team is elevated by his brief absence or her brief absence. So I did a bit of thinking, I don't know if you remember the 2015 NBA playoffs.

But Steph Curry was injured in the first round or the first few rounds of that playoffs. And the MVP of the finals that year, the Golden State Warriors, ended up beating the Cleveland Cavaliers in the finals. The MVP was not Steph Curry. It was Andre Iguodala, like the sixth man of the team. So I wonder if this is kind of like the Iguodala effect. Part of what I've begun wondering about is, is it possible that under the right circumstances,

the team gets better even before the star comes back? So I think about, what was it, it must have been the early, was it 80 or 81 NBA finals when Kareem got injured. And Magic Johnson basically became Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. I remember his baby Skyhook. And you saw a completely different side of Magic Johnson. And then I guess the other example that jumped to mind was, I believe the longest winning streak in hockey history was the Pittsburgh Penguins, 92-93 season.

I think they won 17 games straight. and if I remember correctly, please fact-check this, but if my sports knowledge is not obsolete, that was the year that Mario Lemieux was out being treated for cancer. And he came back on a tear, and the team was that much better. That's right. The Lemieux effect is a pretty good name for this as well. You reminded me there is a study in the literature on the science of science.

And I just thought of this. This was not in my notes. It's called, does science advance one funeral at a time? And the paper shows that when a famous scientist passes away in a field like physics or biology, there's often a flood of papers from outsiders in the field who had no association with that star scientist. And that flood of paper from outsiders who were sidelined by the centrality of that star scientist ends up pushing the research. a novel direction. That's so interesting.

So this is kind of weird to say, but it's not unlike a Ewing theory, but for entire scientific disciplines. Like the field gets smarter with the departure of this aging star. I love it when human psychology in sports is mirrored in science. And I wonder,

there's a sort of more and less benevolent version of that story. The less benevolent version is that the star was in the way, or had sort of aged out of the role but didn't realize it. And I think the more benevolent is what you're describing, which is, we've got to continue this person's legacy.

So reading from the paper's conclusion, quote, we find that publications and grants by scientists that never collaborated with the star surge within the subfield absent the star. Interestingly, this surge is not driven by a reshuffling of leadership within the field, but rather by new entrance that are drawn from outside of it. End quote. So, you know, I'm not trying to trivialize this by like coming up with a name for everything, but I don't know, maybe in a way I kind of am.

This really is a kind of viewing theory. If you think of the entire field of science as a team, the departure of the star really does push science forward by unleashing new creative approaches to old questions. Anyway, enough naming stuff happening in science. Let's talk about predicting success in others, this second pillar of your book. In sports, I think one of the most interesting and important questions is why it's so hard to predict the next great quarterback. Here you have maybe the most important decision that any sports team in American professional sports can make.

Who is our next quarterback? And there's some very good evidence that no one is good at this. No one is good at scouting quarterbacks. There's a great paper by the economist David Barry about how highly drafted quarterbacks do not have more ability. They just get more snaps. From his paper, quote, on a per play basis, quarterbacks chosen with picks 11 through 50, as well as picks 51 through 90, outperform quarterbacks chosen in the top 10. End quote. If highly drafted quarterbacks tend to have better careers overall, it seems to be because they get way more opportunities from teams that have already.

sunk all this draft capital into them. It's so interesting. I mean, the idea that whatever advantage earlier drafted quarterbacks have is more about opportunity than ability fits right in with a theme of hidden potential. I hadn't seen that evidence before. It also reminds me of, I don't know if you've seen Danny Southwick's research on quarterbacks. He's an ex-football player who then did his doctorate with Angela Duckworth here at Penn.

And what Danny found was that we're also making a fundamental mistake. in the way that we draft to begin with. Because we're assuming that what we're interested in is individual ability. But it's actually the match between the quarterback and the system that carries most of the variance. So if I remember correctly, Danny found, and we can fact check this with him, but he found that something like two-thirds of the variance in quarterback performance was a function of the context, not the individual.

And so you could take a bad quarterback and put him in a different team, and he could become surprisingly good. and we see this all the time in the NFL. Kurt Warner effect, maybe? Brock Purdy effect, I think it's what people would say right now. There you go. San Francisco 49th's quarterback who half the league thinks is terrible, but leads the league in QB rating because of his weapons, the offensive line.

Sorry, go right ahead. No, no, but you can also do the reverse, right? So as a Lions fan, I was really nervous when we traded Matthew Stafford for Jared Gough, not knowing how is Gough going to do in our system. And it did seem like there was an adjustment, and now things are going great, and I have hope for the first time

in 30 years since the Packers ruined Barry Sanders' career. But that aside, I think, yeah, I mean, there's the whole question of how much are we actually trying to gauge individual potential in a vacuum versus what is this team need? And are we actually looking for a different set of qualities? Yeah, quarterbacks are so needy. They're the most important position in sports, but they're also so dependent. They don't block for themselves. They don't catch their own passes.

They rarely call their own plays. And yet somehow we tell ourselves that we can definitively rank quarterbacks in a vacuum, even when we only observe them in these highly interdependent conditions. Yeah, I mean, it's crazy in football to have a quarterback rating without an offensive line rating. You have to adjust one by the other. And the same is true in any other domain, right? I need to know how difficult your major was to know what your grades mean. and we don't look at that.

Okay, moving from sports to education, one of the studies that really stuck with me from your book is from this economist, George Bowman, who analyzed data of high school graduates from Florida between 1999 and 2002. And his question was, do high school grades predict future success as defined by graduation rates or income?

And it turns out that freshman grades don't matter almost at all. Sophomore junior grades, they matter a little bit more, and senior grades reveal the most. But what really foreshadows earning potential is improvement in grades between freshman and senior year. If improvement in grades

matters more than GPA, what problem do you think this exposes in our thinking about student potential and college admissions? I mean, it's a massive problem. Grade point average is a broken metric. Every college admissions officer I know when looking at grades uses the average. And that means your freshman grades are weighed the same way.

Excuse me. That means your freshman grades get the same weight as your sophomore grades, your junior grades, and your senior grades first semester. The most predictive grades, senior year second semester, are often thrown out altogether because we have to make the admissions decisions before those grades even exist. I think what we should be doing is evolving from just focusing on grade point average

to looking at grade point trajectory which would really get at the slope that you're talking about the improvement over time and I think in some cases what that shows is that a student has remarkable character skills and has been able to overcome adversity and I think basically to put this in diving terms

or figure skating terms if you prefer what grade point average does is it only scores your execution. Grade point trajectory gives us a little bit of a window into the degree of difficulty that you've faced because usually when students' grades improve from freshman to sophomore year or junior to senior year, it's a signal that there was some kind of obstacle in their path, and then they figured out how to manage it or overcome it. I want to think about implications of this idea for hiring. So the brief takeaway of your study is GPT, grade point trajectory

is more predictive than GPA, grade point average. I feel like in the workforce, the equivalent of GPA would be something like credentials. It's so easy in the workforce to hire two credentials. What would the GPT approach to hiring look like? Well, you can actually do this in the context of an interview. So I'm fascinated by this call center,

call Yechol, in Israel. that hires people with disabilities. And one of the things they do is at the end of the interview, they ask you how you think it went, and then they offer you a do-over if you weren't happy with your performance. So guess what? You can see the trajectory from interview one to interview two. And somebody who shows real improvement

is demonstrating both a motivation and a capacity to grow. let's say a general manager of an NBA team calls you up and says, hey, I want you to visit our scouting team and our front office. And I want you to present the implication of this book for our teams. What do you tell them? Well, if it's scouting, we're talking about finding diamonds in the rough, probably. What I would, you know, it's funny. I've, okay, so I've been in that situation.

What have I told them? I've told at least one NBA team that if I were in their shoes, I would shift some of the interview questions away from, you know, tell me about your background, just generally, and toward, tell me about the biggest obstacles you've faced and how you navigated them.

And there's some research that did not make book that speaks to a victim mentality and psychological entitlement, which is essentially that when talking about adversity, people who are not likely to show future growth are the ones who blame others for their problems. And the people who are likely to continue to improve and also to do so even in the face of major challenges are the ones who say, here's the challenge I faced, and here's how I took responsibility for overcoming it. You have an interesting section here about some of the implications of this research for affirmative action policies. You write, quote, affirmative action is often a double-edged sword,

even for the people it is designed to serve, end quote. Why? Remarkably, I wrote that whole section before the Supreme Court decision. So it's become much more timely than I intended. So basically, there's a meta-analysis, a study of studies, looking at what happens when people are hired in an organization or admitted to a university where there's known to be an affirmative action policy. Yeah, so basically, if you're a member of an underrepresented group and your organization is known to have affirmative action, you tend to perform worse in the task or job in front of you. And part of that seems to be driven by other people questioning whether you really earned your place. And part of that seems to be driven by you doubting whether you really earn that

opportunity. And so, you know, I think this really complicates policies that are designed to correct historic injustices by saying, look, if we're going to create stigma for the very people that we're trying to open doors for, and we're also going to leave other people, you know, questioning whether this was really fair. Is that a net positive in the long run? I don't know. What's, I mean, again, you know, I'm sort of asking you to divulge to this audience, what you might divulge to, you know, private audiences at NBA and NFL front offices and admissions offices across the country. But let's say an admissions office comes to you. They read this chapter and they confront the meta-analysis that you pointed out that, you know, even for the people that affirmative action is designed to

It can have this sort of, I like how you pointed out, that it's sort of a double stigma. Not only can self-doubt creep in, but also they might be put in positions that are less likely to succeed. And I think it's important to keep mind of both of those. But if they still have this interest in equity, and they still really want to identify people who seem to be in many ways, like the stars of your book, people who have faced adversity and have traveled the furthest from bottom of the mountain to the top of the mountain, how do they incorporate that concept into their policies?

How essentially do they move from sort of like 20th century affirmative action approach to like the GPT approach, right? Like looking for potential and the ability to overcome adversity, which might yield some similar but more successful results. Yeah. So look, it could not be more important to find systemic ways to create opportunities for people who have been deprived of it. And I don't know that there are easy answers to this question.

I think that, you know, affirmative action has benefits and it has costs. And most policies that have upsides have unintended consequences, right? I'm an organizational psychologist, not a policy expert. So I never know what to do from a policy perspective. Here's what I can tell you, though, Derek. I think one of the mistakes of, you know, a lot of affirmative action policies is that they assess people by their group membership as opposed to their individual experience. And I think that what we may need to do is to focus more on individual experiences.

So it's a little bit like, I would think about this a little bit like wrestling weight classes. Like you wouldn't put a 120-pound wrestler in, you know, you wouldn't expect them to do well against a 300-pounder. But we compare students all the time who have had different opportunities and different advantages. And so what if we had weight classes? I think the admissions version of this is we want to compare students to their peer group on an objective level, as opposed to all of the candidates. So there are a bunch of concrete ways to do this. One would be you should actually show the grades of their class or their major or their school

so that there's a common frame of reference. That's one way to contextualize performance. Another is let's show students' grades relative to their neighborhood so that you can see, wow, this is a student who really stood out in a low-income area, who might not have looked remarkable if we just looked at GPA or even GPT, not chat GPT. Great point trajectory. And there's a UK precedent for this, which is universities, and we see employers doing this now, too, looking at specific indicators

that you as a candidate have faced economic hardship. So they'll, for example, look at have you held a work-study job? Have you gotten free meals as a signal that you've faced adversity? And we've got to adjust your performance for those kinds of disadvantages.

And if we don't, we are missing out not only on creating opportunities for people who have been denied them, we're also missing out on diamonds in the rough. Adam Grant, the book is Hidden Potential. Thank you very much. Honored.

Thank you, Derek. Thank you.