Something You Should Know - 3 Words for Effective Goals & The Generation Myth - SYSK Choice

Episode Date: January 6, 2024

Scientists have studied what is the perfect temperature in an office or work environment. And the magic number is 77 degrees Fahrenheit. What’s so magical about 77 degrees? I begin this episode with the explanation and what happens if temperature gets too far off from there. https://heatmyjob.com/office-temperature-can-play-part-employee-output/  The beginning of the year is when people set new goals for themselves. And it turns out that the process you use to set your goals will make a difference in how successful you are in reaching them. That’s the message from Michael Bungay Stanier. Often described as one of the top coaches in the world, Michael is author of a book called, How to Begin: Start Doing Something That Matters (https://amzn.to/3qL3UiH). When you follow his advice, you will most likely improve the chances that your goals will be reached.  It seems pretty random how we categorize people into groups depending on when they were born. We have baby boomers, millennials, Gen Xers and a few others I imagine. But is that fair? Is their any reason to think that people born in a certain generation share traits and characteristics? Should we be generalizing about a group based on when they were born? Here to discuss this is Bobby Duffy, professor of public policy and director of the Policy Institute at King’s College in London and author of the book, The Generation Myth: Why When You’re Born Matters Less Than You Think (https://amzn.to/3eUyIrL).   Germs can spread throughout a household in many different ways - and one is through your toothbrush. Listen as I explain how this happens and how you can prevent those toothbrush germs from infecting others. Source: Dr. Philip M. Tierno, author of The Secret Life of Germs (https://amzn.to/3HBF4bV). PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS! PrizePicks is a skill-based, real-money Daily Fantasy Sports game that's super easy to play. Go to https://prizepicks.com/sysk and use code sysk for a first deposit match up to $100 Zocdoc is a FREE app and website where you can search and compare highly-rated, in-network doctors near you AND instantly book appointments with them online. Go to https://Zocdoc.com/SYSK and download the Zocdoc app for FREE. Dell Technologies and Intel are pushing what technology can do, so great ideas can happen! Find out how to bring your ideas to life at https://Dell.com/WelcomeToNow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Download June's Journey now on Android or iOS. Today on Something You Should Know, the temperature inside the room you work can have a big impact on the number of mistakes you make. Then, if your goals for the new year are going to come true, you have to word them just right. The first time you come up with a worthy goal, your first draft is often not the best draft. It actually is useful to dig into it and test it and interrogate it a bit and move it from being

the same old New Year's resolution that you've always had. Also, how your toothbrush can spread germs to other people in the house. And generational thinking, where we label people by the generation they were born. Baby boomers, millennials, Gen Xers. Is that fair? Generational thinking, the differences between generations, is a really big idea that has been horribly corrupted by terrible myths, cliches, and stereotypes. All this today on Something You Should Know. This winter, take a trip to Tampa on Porter Airlines. Enjoy the warm Tampa Bay temperatures and warm Porter hospitality on your way there.

All Porter fares include beer, wine, and snacks, and free fast-streaming Wi-Fi on planes with no middle seats. And your Tampa Bay vacation includes good times, relaxation, and great Gulf Coast weather. Visit flyporter.com and actually enjoy economy. Something you should know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts and practical advice you can use in your life today something you should know with mike carothers hey welcome to something you should know whether you work at home or you work in an office with other people, the temperature in the room in which you work can have a real impact on how well and how accurate your work is. It seems that if your workplace is chilly,

you're more likely to make more errors. While employers may think they're saving money by keeping the temperature low, it actually may be costing them more. In one study, the number of typos and other keyboard errors in an office fell by 44%, and the typing output increased by 150% when the office temperature was raised from 68 degrees to 77 degrees Fahrenheit. The results of the study suggest that raising the temperature saves employers about $2 per worker per hour. Of course, not everybody likes a warm office, so there may be some negotiation required.

But a cold office could be costly. And that is something you should know. Typically, it's around the early part of the year when people start to think about setting new goals. Not just New Year's resolutions, but perhaps more substantial goals. Financial goals, career goals, social goals. But setting goals and sticking to them and achieving them can be a real struggle why is that why are goals so hard is it that the goal is wrong or the motivation is wrong or it's just too hard or the plan to achieve isn't well thought out well there are plenty of people who offer advice on

setting and achieving goals and one person whose advice is a little different and can maybe make your goals a little more achievable is Michael Bungay-Stainer. Michael is often described as one of the top coaches in the world. He's also author of a couple of books, including his latest, How to Begin, Start Doing Something That Matters. Hi, Michael. Welcome back to Something You Should Know. Mike, thank you. I'm happy to be here.

So, setting and trying to achieve goals, that process seems to be very important to people. Because it seems like everyone has goals. Everyone tries to figure out how to achieve those goals. We often struggle. We sometimes fail, we often fail, and yet we persist in setting goals. So why do you think this process is so prone to failure? I think often the way we set goals is a bit vague and a bit demoralizing, if I'm blunt about it. I mean, we've all heard of this idea of setting a smart goal, and that kind of makes sense, you know, specific and measurable and actionable and all of that. But what that's doing is fine-tuning how you deliver against the goal. It doesn't ask the

bigger question, which is, well, what are the right goals for you to be taking on? And I want people to feel that they can be ambitious for themselves and for the world in the way that they set goals for themselves. It sometimes seems that people set goals because those are the kind of goals that others expect of them, that that's what you should do because you were told that's what you should do, not because that's what you really want to do. I think you're right. You know, often these goals are kind of inherited or there's that sense of obligation. Sometimes it's an external force. Sometimes it's an internal force. It's like, oh, I'm this person at this time. I should be doing this by now. And that's why I think when you think about setting what I call a worthy goal, often it's useful to think that a worthy goal has three legs to it. It needs to be thrilling, it needs to be important, and it needs to be daunting. Well, it seems though that a lot of the goals that

you should attempt to achieve might not be thrilling, but they might be important, they might be necessary, they might be, you know, they might save your life, but maybe not so thrilling. Sure. Well, look, the way I think about it, Mike, is you need to hold up these three lenses to any goal that you set yourself just so that you're aware of what's going on. So the way I think about it is start with thrilling. And what's nice about a thrilling goal is you just get to own it,

whether you're going to be excited about it or not, because it will speak to what you care about, what your values are, who you want to be in this world, who you want to grow up to be in this world. It's pretty much about me, me, me. And that's a really helpful counter to that sense of obligation that you were talking about before, that sense that sometimes we've inherited goals that we're not that excited about. But then you want to also ask yourself, well, is this goal important? Meaning, does it serve more than me? Does it give more to the world than it takes? And what's useful about thinking about the bigger

picture, the kind of the bigger contribution that this goal might help you with, is that it gets it away from being just about you, being just self-serving. And then the third attribute, daunting, is when you go, is this goal going to stretch me and grow me and help me learn? Because it's in the stretching and growing that the personal growth happens. I mean, we unlock our greatness by working on the hard things. So it asks you, does this goal have a suitable amount of heft, suitable amount of challenge for you so that you might see the best version of yourself emerge by taking on this worthy goal. Do you think that if you asked people, what are your goals? What are the things you want to accomplish in the next whatever year, two, five years, 10 years, whatever,

that people have a sense of what they are or they don't? Well, I think that there's a lot of people who have some slightly dented New Year's resolutions that they've kind of recast as goals. They're like, oh, no, this year I'm going to tell my kids I love them, lose some weight, exercise some more, try and get a promotion, write a book, whatever it might be for them. So I think that's often what's going on. But I do think that just the demands of our busy lives mean that for many of us, we show up and we're just swept along by other people's ambitions and other people's goals. And we're contributing to that. And there's nothing wrong in being a contributor to those bigger pictures. That's part of what working for a company can be like.

But within that, I want people to have a think about claiming their own authority being a contributor to those bigger pictures. That's part of what working for a company can be like. But within that, I want people to have a think about claiming their own authority to say, look, this is my life. I only get one go at this life. What would make this a thrilling and important and a daunting life for me? So give me some examples of what you think of as worthy goals. Sure. Well, you know, there's a community of people I work with, and we talk about this all the time. Examples of what you think of as worthy goals. Sure. Well, you know, there's a community of people I work with, and we talk about this all the time.

So let me give you examples from this community. You know, there's a woman, Michelle. Her son was a drug user and homeless and died as a homeless man. And she spent 20 years mourning that as part of her worthy goal, thinking about thrilling and important and daunting. She's actually set up a foundation in celebration of him. His name is Michael. And as actually building a homeless shelter or contributing to build a homeless shelter. So that's pretty fantastic. There's another person who works in a big organization. And he's like, I need to launch this program, and I need to do it in a way that doesn't wimp out because he's wimped out before. So how do I launch that in a way that really matters to me?

There's another person who is in a non-nuclear family. So she has a child with another partner. She has a current partner, and her goal is to manage the separation from her previous partner and to do the childcare and the child management that's around that in a way that is full of grace and generosity and with boundaries as well. So three very different worthy goals, but each one of them are connected to a sense of, is it thrilling? Does it light me up? Does it matter to me? Is it important? Does it make the world a bit better? And is it going to stretch me and is it going to grow me? And it would seem that in order for a goal to do what you just said, it has to be drafted or crafted in a way that the goal is pretty specific because often it seems people have very vague goals.

You know, I want to make more money or I want to lose weight or, you know, but there's no real test to it. There's no, like, how do you know you've achieved it if your goal is a little vague and out of focus? Part of what you're pointing to, I think this is so helpful, is to understand that the first time you come up with a worthy goal or a goal, let's call it, your first draft is often not the best draft. It actually is useful to dig into it and test it, stick a finger into it and interrogate it a bit to tighten it up, strengthen it and move it from

being the same old New Year's resolution that you've always had to something that is sufficient to pull you forward and keep you going. It does seem that a lot of goals that people set for themselves are, I guess you'd call them negative goals in that they want to stop eating lousy food. They want to stop drinking. They want to stop smoking. They want to stop eating lousy food. They want to stop drinking. They want to stop smoking. They want to stop doing something.

So it's hard to make that thrilling when it's not something you want to do. It's something you want to stop doing. So how do you make it thrilling? So I don't, I don't, I'm not going to try and pretend that that's not tricky, but I'll just give you an example within my own life. My, my wife, three years ago, had you an example within my own life. My wife, three years ago, had a bit of a health scare. And the doctor went, look, you're going to lose a bit of weight because we're going to knock your blood pressure down or else we'll just have to put you

on statins. And my wife is not great at taking orders from doctors. So she's like, absolutely not. I am going to figure this out. So she went vegan and and kind of in this active way less about losing weight and more about committing to a healthier eating plan has absolutely changed her life and she she continues to be really enthusiastic about it now that to me is a really great example of finding the way of going how can a goal that might not be that exciting become thrilling for you? But that's the question to ask, which is like, all right, if I've got this goal that I've set myself to lose weight, and honestly, every time I even think about it, my heart sinks a little bit. Well, I'm pretty sure that you're not going to be able to lose weight. You're not

going to be able to sustain the commitment to this goal that you want to have. But if you can think to yourself, what would it take for this goal to be thrilling for me, important for the world, daunting for me, then you're more likely to find a goal that will actually help pull you forward through the tough times. We're talking about goals, your goals, how to set them and how to achieve them. And my guest is Michael Bungay-Stainer, described as one of the top coaches in the entire world. And he's author of the book, How to Begin, Start Doing Something That Matters. This is an ad for BetterHelp.

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So, Michael, my guess is, my sense is, that many a goal that is thrilling, important, and daunting is going to fail the first time because it's hard. I think you're exactly right. So this is part of the challenge of taking it on and part of the way of navigating this. Because what would be lovely is if we do the work to draft and redraft, and then we come up with a worthy goal that kind of fits us just right, and we're excited about it. And it'd be cool if we could just kind of whip out our phones, type in the end destination into Google Maps, and it would just tell us how to get there. Take a left, take a right, it's going to take you 16 minutes. But actually, that's not the way you travel.

A friend of mine and another great author, Liz Wiseman, has got a new book out called Impact Players. She says, look, daunting is when you know how to start this, but you don't know how to finish it. I think that's a pretty good definition. So one of the key insights about how you travel when you do a worthy goal is don't try and do it all in a single bound. Know that this is daunting. So you're not going to know how to do this. You're going to spend some time being, as they say, consciously incompetent. Not only do you not know how to do it, but You're going to spend some time being, as they say, consciously incompetent. Not only do you not know how to do it, but you're going to feel a bit bad while you're trying to figure it out. But if you move in small steps, kind of do little experiments and make a bit of

progress and then stop and then go, okay, now what do I know? Now where am I? Now what's the next little journey for me to take? You're more likely to get moving on this. Yeah, well, that's a thing too, is I think when people look at goals, this is something I want to do. It's an event. I want to accomplish this. But there's a lot of goals that things like weight loss or exercise, it isn't ever done. And what you're pointing to, Mike, which I think is brilliant, is that so often it's in the doing of the work that the magic happens. It's not achieving the goal. It's not actually finishing the finish line. You know, the phrase I love is we unlock our greatness by doing the hard things. And that's deliberately not we unlock our greatness by winning the trophy

or getting the prize or crossing the finish line. It's in the work to lose the weight. It's in the work to exercise. It's in the work to set up a shelter in memorial for your homeless son. It's in the work to write a new book that actually the best of you starts coming forth and you make progress on something that matters. Where do you think the sticking point is? Where's the trouble in this? Where do people usually go, I can't do this? I think there's two things that I would point to, Mike. The first is, it is hard to do this stuff by yourself. It's hard to do it alone. And even though we have these cultures which are like, you know, grit your teeth and buckle down and get on with it.

And if you don't do this, you personally are a failure. The truth is the people who succeed in this are often the ones that have, who travel with other people, you know, metaphorically or literally. But Mike, there's a deeper level where we find resistance. And the deeper level is this. When we take on a worthy goal, something thrilling and important and daunting, we're moving into the future. We're moving into a version of our future self. And that is very exciting until you realize that it means giving up on some of what is happening right now, giving up on some of the status quo. So the deeper level to think about this and interrogate your worthy goal is, look, what am I saying yes to when I say yes to this worthy goal? And if I'm really

saying that, if I'm really up for this change, what must I say no to? And that is often a real challenge because it's hard to sometimes articulate it. And saying no to something often means saying no to somebody. So who needs to not be in your life? I wonder if people will sometimes feel, listen to you and say, well, you know, I should have a worthy goal, but there's nothing. There's nothing. I don't, everything's fine. Well, that may be the case. So it may be the case you look around and you go, you know what?

I am delighted with my life right now. The way things are rolling out, the way I'm living my life, the people in my life, the work, how I'm spending my time, my 140 minutes a week or whatever that is, I'm set for that. In which case, fabulous. I suspect that this too will pass. I suspect that, you know, for me, this idea of we unlock our greatness by working on the hard things. We get to see the next best version of ourselves. We get to engage in our world. We get to give more to the world than we take. For some people, that's a compelling call.

And those are the people for whom this worthy goal framework might be helpful. But I wonder if this approach could be looked at as like it's too formal. It's too much of a hard line commitment, right? And I've got to go through all these steps. And, you know, if something comes up, yeah, okay, I'll do it. But, but this process seems a lot of work. You know what, it is work. I can't deny it. And I've created it to try and be the least work possible to get the results that you want. So I'm trying to plot a journey for how I spend a bit of my life. And that isn't necessarily a casual affair. And all I know, Mike, is that when I do some work on this and I set a worthy goal and I've interrogated it and I've actually

thought about it and I've kind of gone, am I really up for this? It means that when I commit, I'm actually committed to it and it's a better chance of it actually happening. So what's the advice when you fail, when you fall off the wagon, when you eat the ice cream and now you think, well, crap, everything's ruined and so screw it and so how do you get back on the horse well i think it's this will sound obvious i think it's about getting back on the horse because often if we're going to kind of go with this eating ice cream horse metaphor often you like you you fall off the horse you eat the ice cream and you're like well there's no point in me ever getting back on this horse again i'm just going to indulge myself in ice cream and you're like, well, there's no point in me ever getting back on this horse again. I'm just going to indulge myself in ice cream. And so I do think that part of it is around just recognizing that it's not a question of will you fail? It's a question of course you'll

fail. We are all human. We are all flawed. We all are overcommitted. There's all sorts of reasons why you will slip. So it's in slipping that that's just part of the process. Where the process breaks is if you're not going, okay, this means I'm a bad person, or okay, this means I'm not going to learn from this experience, or okay, this means I'm not going to ever try this again because I failed once. So one of the tactics that I use, which I stole from somebody, a guy called Ben Zanders, wrote a book called The Art of Creativity, I think, some 20 years ago. He says, look, when things go wrong, and they will always go wrong, a wonderful reaction is you throw your hands up in the air, which shifts your physiological state, and you say, how fascinating. Now, Ben Zanders has a British accent, so it sounds particularly good when he does it. But what that does in saying how fascinating is it means that you

move physically out of a position of despair, defeat, into something more victorious. And it says in the word, how fascinating you're like, this is interesting. This isn't personal. I wonder what I can learn from this. It's good to have noticed what's happened now. And now I get to choose what happens next. So how fascinating puts you into that place of curiosity, but it doesn't remove you from a place of commitment. So I've often heard the advice that, you know, if you want to set a goal, it's helpful to write it down. So if you're going to write it down, what should it look like?

So that's a really great question, Mike, because actually I do think how you craft your worthy goal can make a difference to the likelihood of it being the right worthy goal and one that you can stick with. Then what I do with my worthy goals, and I recommend this to others, is to start it with a verb, a doing word, an action word. Because if you frame your worthy goal just as an outcome, I'm 145 pounds, not 175 pounds, actually you don't see the process that's going to get you there.

You just see an outcome. And weirdly, our brain plays tricks on us, which is if we focus too much on the end goal, our brain actually goes, it feels like we've already got it. And it makes you less incentivized to actually pursue it. So what a verb does, an action word does, is it makes it clear about the doing that needs to be done, that work that needs to be done. We unlock our greatness by taking on the hard things. It's the taking on of it.

So constructed like that, it's useful if it's a sentence, can be a long sentence, but I normally am trying to go for five to seven words. And then what's helpful is once you feel like you've got it about right, you think, I wonder if there's a word or two that I could add to it that would make it a little bit more specific that could make this even more powerful for me. I really like this idea of making a goal thrilling, important, and daunting because it seems so often those goals of, yeah, I'm going to lose a little weight or, yeah, I'm going to try to get a better job or they kind of wither on the vine because they're, they're not, they're not thrilling, important or daunting. They're just kind of, yeah. And by, by pumping those goals up, I think you're right. I think people have a much better

chance of achieving them. Michael Bungay-Stainer has been my guest. His book is called How to Begin. Start doing something that matters, and you'll find a link to that book in the show notes. Good to have you on, Michael. Brilliant. Mike, thank you. From the kitchen to the laundry room, your home deserves the best. Give it the upgrade it deserves at Best Buy's Ultimate Appliance Event. Save up to $1,000 on two or more major appliances. Shop now, in-store, or online at bestbuy.ca. Exclusions apply. Mama, look at me.

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I want to go to Jack's place today. I'll just take the car. Don't wait up, okay? Kids go from 0 to 18 in no time, don't they? At Intact Insurance, we insure your car so you can enjoy the ride. Visit Intact.ca or talk to your broker. Conditions apply. It's a little weird when you think about it, but we have a tendency to identify people according to when they were born. You know, there was the World War II generation. There were baby boomers and millennials.

You know what I mean. And we tend to attribute certain characteristics to the people in these groups. But is that fair? Can you generalize about people just because they were born between this year and that year? Well, that's something Bobby Duffy has taken a look at. Bobby is a professor of public policy and director of the Policy Institute at King's College in London, and he is author of the book, The Generation Myth, Why When You're Born Matters Less Than You Think. Hey, Bobby, welcome. Great to be here, Mike. Thank you for asking. So this idea of naming generations, that the people born between this year and that year,

we're going to call them Generation X, or we're going to call them Millennials, and then we're going to assign certain attributes to these people. This seems like it's been going on for quite some time, implying that maybe there's some validity to it. So what is going on here? thinking, the differences between generations, is a really big idea in sociology and philosophy that has been horribly corrupted by terrible myths, cliches, and stereotypes. So the myths are all the frothy differences that are claimed to be defining of different generations, which are not really true. So give me some examples of what these generations are, and then therefore what these people are supposed to be like who are in these generations.

So we group people into these social generations that start from things like baby boomers, Generation X, millennials, and Gen Z. And then we often assign them unique characteristics, for example, that millennials are materialistic, although now we're talking about Gen Z being particularly materialistic as well. And that is just not true. It's based on a misreading of the realities. What you see when I look at the long-term trends across millions of surveys is that young people tend to be materialistic, but we tend to grow out of that as we get older. And we ascribe this as a unique characteristic of, say, millennials calling on the me, me, me generation, when actually it's more a feature of youth that we grow out of. So we mix up these effects where actually that's what I would call a life cycle effect, where young people start off being very focused on things, and then they realize as they grow older that there's more to life than

that. And that's a repeated cycle that you see throughout history when we look at the different responses from different age groups over time. So that sort of materialism being a defining characteristic of a generation is one of them. But then we also have these very contradictory visions of different cohorts. So at the same time as calling Gen Z or millennials particularly materialistic, we will say that they're particularly into brand purpose or climate change, worrying about climate change. When actually, when you look at the data on that, that is another myth. There's not the big gaps between young and old in their concern about social purpose, the climate that you would expect from the rhetoric that you hear about

the different generations. What about the criticism that some people in the younger generations are not prepared for life, that they've been babied, that their parents have done everything for them, they're somewhat snowflakey, easily offended? What about that? Is that a real thing? Or more importantly, is that a real generational thing yeah it's a really good point um there is a lot of characteristics around snowflakes that are ascribed to the current generation and some of it is true and some of it isn't and it's really important to separate those two things so the thing that is true about younger cohorts right now, generations coming through right now, is a real trend called delayed adulthood. So there is absolutely the case that

younger people today are perhaps growing up slower. So there is this real, very real trend of delayed adulthood that you see in all sorts of ways of young people living at home with their parents for longer. That is true. And we need to be mindful of that, that when young people will need more support coming into higher education establishments or into their first job, that is true. What's not true is this sense that we have a particular cohort of social justice warriors or people that are particularly sensitive about culture change type issues. What we see is repeated again throughout history is young people are always more at the leading edge of cultural change and more comfortable with these emergent ideas than older people.

Again, we're kind of mixing up the effects there, because I would argue that that's much more a period effect, as we would call it in social science, where it feels like young people are strange and different from previous cohorts. But that's because our information environment has changed so much so that we have social media that really emphasizes and exaggerates extreme examples of behavior compared to the types of information that we had in the past when really the gaps between young and old on culture change issues are no different from the gaps between young and old in the past. And in some ways, actually, baby boomers were more different from their parents on their views of these social and cultural issues

than young people are today from their parents. So we're mixing up these types of effects and turning it into an overall caricature of a generation that's partly true and also partly false. I mean, we need to sort through those myths and realities. But there are realities of change. When I was a kid, when I was in high school, we would get jobs in, you know, fast food places, retail stores, you know, minimum wage jobs to generate some money because that's just what kids do. But kids don't really seem to do that so much anymore. A lot of those fast food places and retail places will tell you

it's hard to attract high school and young college age kids into those kind of jobs because they don't necessarily, well, they don't necessarily want to work in those jobs. And that's a real change. Yeah, I mean, I think it's how society has changed. I mean, I don't, I think that is, I think it's a real change. It's a real trend. Is it a real problem? It's kind of a different way of living that you would, you know, societies change over time. When you look back to the great thinkers in generational change, people like Karl Mannheim, who's a Hungarian sociologist, and Auguste Comte, the French philosopher, and then more modern people like Norman Ryder,

who's a demographer, Canadian demographer, who talks about this type of generational change as a kind of demographic metabolism that keeps society fresh. We always have that sense of change coming through from new generations. I think it's a different way of living. Is it a problem? I think it is in some ways where we've got greater challenges for supporting these young people who've got less experience. But equally, I mean, there's lots of upsides for that in terms of younger people's more time to explore and develop themselves. I mean, it makes sense in a society where people are living longer, healthier lives, that you take longer to form your full personality.

So I kind of think there's swings and roundabouts, and the danger is as older generations, we view that change as increasingly problematic because it's not something that we grew up with ourselves, but that's from our perspective. I think from younger people's perspective, it's a kind of natural evolution, cultural and social evolution that has positives as well as negatives. But it seems as if for as long as anybody can remember, the older generations have had that, oh, these kids today kind of attitude that there's something wrong with today's youth. And then when those kids grow up,

they have the same view of the new generation. Exactly. That's such an important point to keep in mind is that you can trace it back to Socrates and his views of young people. He really didn't like young people in his day thinking that they just loved luxury and had bad manners. And you can trace it through all ages, all eras. There is always the same kind of perspective on today's generations of young people are uniquely wrong or weird compared to previous generations of young people. And that is our perspective as older groups. And in some ways, that's quite encouraging or natural. We shouldn't be too down on ourselves or worried about that. In some ways, that reflects the fact that we need young people coming through

in order to keep society fresh. And Norman Ryder, the demographer, talks about how if we didn't have that, society would turn into a stagnant pond. So our reaction and our fear or misunderstanding of young people is utterly natural, in fact, actually essential to society moving forward. One big difference today that I see is that a lot of the negative opinions people have, older people have, of younger generations is the fault of older generations. In other words, kids in the 50s or the 60s, they rebelled, but it was them rebelling, and that caused problems, perhaps. But today, it's because mom and dad are trailing along on job interviews with their kids or college admission interviews that kids aren't allowed to, you know, fail. You know, it's that failure to launch problem that, in other words, it's not the kids, it's not the generations themselves, it's the meddling of older generations with the

younger generations causing the problems. Yeah, absolutely. We're so connected up and down the generations in that. And I do have a lot of sympathy for the views that young people are anti-fragile. You know, they need stress in order to grow. So we have got that issue with being overprotective of young people, because actually you can't protect them from all society's challenges or harms. And actually, that's not good for them. You need that sense of adversity to grow. I mean, I would say, again, there are real data and real examples and trends within that that show that that is a real trend.

But I would also say that we do tend to generalise from extreme examples of kids being coddled too much, when actually, for a lot of young people, that is not the way they're living. Again, I'd go back to the point that one of the big changes now is we hear much more about those examples of coddled kids because we've got a very different information environment where extreme examples of those types of behaviours are shared much more easily between people and seem much more prevalent than they actually are. is that when you look back at baby boomers and their parents, and probably their parents, at least according to books you read and movies you see,

there wasn't this overprotective parenting thing that we see today. When I was a kid, we were pretty much left on our own a lot. It was more of a kids are meant to be seen and not heard. You know, you kids go off and play. You don't need a helmet. You're fine. And that's really changed a lot. And I think people wonder, like, where did that come from? Is it because those kids were so left on their own that they're not leaving their own kids alone? Where does it come from? Because it seems to have been several generations of kids not being so important. Yeah, no, that, again, that's a real change. And some of it is reaction, where you see these waves

of parents trying to do different, approach child rearing differently from their own parents. Part of it is just this general sense of culture change. And when we start on these trends and people observe other people parenting in a different sorts of way, they follow that trend too. I've seen these long waves of, you're quite right,

that not that long ago, just a few decades ago, children's happiness was not really seen as a core aspect of parenting. It was much more about discipline and behaviour, making sure that behaviour was correct, not so much about their personal happiness. And that kind of evolved in second half of the 20th century and has kept evolving into a very different kind of views of what is a parent's role. And you can see in the time use surveys, which get people to outline how they spend each of their days, you can see the enormous increase in contact between parents and their children compared to when I was brought up even in the 1970s and 1980s, there's just been a huge increase, partly as a result of these cultural changes,

partly as a result of technological changes. The job of looking after the home of cooking and cleaning and all those types of aspects of domestic life have been automated to a much greater degree and people have more free time. So there's lots of trends pushed us towards this quite different relationship between parents and their children than we had in the past. And a lot of that, again, is positive in terms of you look at the ratings of relations between parents and their kids. And again, on average, a much more positive and close relationship than we had in the past but you're right as well that it has negative impacts as well in terms of are younger people quite as independent or ready for adult life the answer is no they've had less of that

type of experience and again very clear trends in children less likely to have independent time, less likely to travel as far on their own than in the past. So yes, absolutely. Those are real changes. parents were very involved and very protective of, that those kids have grown up and probably have kids of their own. Are we seeing the same kind of overprotectiveness, for lack of a better word, or are they rebelling and saying, you know what, I was smothered and I'm going to let my kids do whatever they want? No, not as far as I can see in the data as yet. I don't think we've had any kind of switch back into certainly discussion and individual thinking on this about we need more free-range kids again. But in terms of the overall trends in how people are parenting in practice, no, I don't think we've quite seen that switch back. And it is partly because we have got big trends

that pushes in that direction, where you've got a stagnant economy in lots of countries around the world, even pre the pandemic, and greater competition for good good good roles good jobs that that emphasis on helping your kids to get ahead in education and in other aspects of life is is a really really important trend and it does push us towards being more involved in our kids' life than perhaps we were in the past, where we had a greater sense of automatic progress between the generations. We've really lost that sense of optimism that our kids' future will be automatically better than the life that we had.

People classify generations by name. There's baby boomers and millennials and Gen Xers. And you've clearly pointed out that some of that isn't quite right. And some of the stuff is not fair. But so what? I mean, what's the big harm? It's a really good question. I think the stereotypes come from lots of different incentives uh from people there are people who claim to be millennial consultants or millennial experts there's 400 of those on linkedin um so there are people who are very invested in saying that there's something different between generations and i can help you understand it um and then act on that so there are incentives to

exaggerate those things the things that i think the problem i think with these stereotypes and cliches is it separates the generations artificially we have already drifted apart we're living in the most age segregated societies that humans have lived in. And that is a real shame because we know that there are huge benefits from old and young interacting outside of families as well as inside families. We're losing that sense. And these stereotypes and clichés add to a false sense of separation between the generations. And I don't think that's good for any of us, old or young.

Well, I find it so interesting that it does seem natural almost to categorize people by their age range. These kids today are those baby boomers, the Gen Xers, the millennials. It's kind of a lazy way to categorize people because just because you were born between two years chosen basically at random doesn't mean you share attributes with anybody else born in those years but there is that tendency to do that and I suspect there always will be

but it's interesting to dig under the surface and see what's going on Bobby Duffy has been my guest. He is a professor of public policy at King's College in London, and he is author of the book, The Generation Myth, Why When You're Born Matters Less Than You Think. And there's a link to that book in the show notes at Amazon. Thanks, Bobby. Appreciate it.

Thanks very much, Mike. That was brilliant. We're probably all more aware and careful about germs than we were a couple of years ago. And one of the things people tend to do is after someone has been sick in the house, you buy a new toothbrush. And that turns out to be a pretty good idea. But it's not just the toothbrush that's a problem. It's the toothbrush holder. It's actually best to store toothbrushes in separate cups because when you stick them all together on that one big toothbrush holder in the bathroom, they could touch each other and germs could get spread. If you want to stop germs from spreading from brush to brush,

it's a good idea to dip each one in hydrogen peroxide at least once a week and let them air dry. That will quickly kill any bacteria or viruses on there, according to Dr. Philip Tierno, who is author of the book The Secret Life of Germs. And that is something you should know. And remember, we publish episodes of this podcast three times a week, Monday, Thursday, and Saturday. And like a fresh loaf of bread, it's always better the first day. So remember to listen the day it publishes.

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