Something You Should Know - Best of Something You Should Know 2017 - Vol 1

Episode Date: December 25, 2017

As 2017 draws to a close, this is the first of two, year-end episodes that look back at some of the most fascinating people and topics of the year. Below are the links to the original episodes from which these excerpts are taken so you can listen to the complete interviews if you wish. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! Topics and Links in this Episode How to Think Smarter with Dr. Art Markman. Podcast Episode 46. http://www.somethingyoushouldknow.net/046-how-to-think-smarter-and-better-documents-you-should-shred-you-never-knew/ The Power of Magical Thinking with Matthew Hutson Podcast Episode 51. http://www.somethingyoushouldknow.net/051-what-your-dog-is-really-thinking-why-superstitions-actually-work/ How Social Media Does & Doesn’t Work with Ed Keller. Podcast Episode 65. http://www.somethingyoushouldknow.net/065-how-social-media-marketing-works-and-doesnt-work-the-story-behind-the-3-digit-security-code-on-credit-cards/ How to Daydream, Distract and Doodle Your Way to Success with Srini Pollay, M.D. Podcast Episode 66 http://www.somethingyoushouldknow.net/066-how-to-daydream-distract-and-doodle-your-way-to-success-a-world-of-video-games-you-never-knew/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As a listener to Something You Should Know, I can only assume that you are someone who likes to learn about new and interesting things and bring more knowledge to work for you in your everyday life. I mean, that's kind of what Something You Should Know was all about. And so I want to invite you to listen to another podcast called TED Talks Daily. Now, you know about TED Talks, right? Many of the guests on Something You Should Know have done TED Talks. Well, you see, TED Talks Daily is a podcast that brings you a new TED Talk every weekday in less than 15 minutes. Join host Elise Hu.

She goes beyond the headlines so you can hear about the big ideas shaping our future. Learn about things like sustainable fashion, embracing your entrepreneurial spirit, the future of robotics, and so much more. Like I said, if you like this podcast, Something You Should Know, I'm pretty sure you're going to like TED Talks Daily. And you get TED Talks Daily wherever you get your podcasts. We'll be right back. developing smarter habits. Then, if you believe in superstitions, they may actually work. There is research showing that people who thought they were using a lucky golf ball sunk

35% more golf putts. Also, social media marketing may not be all it's cracked up to be. The overwhelming amount of word of mouth that takes place is still in the real world, offline, face-to-face. And why daydreaming and being unfocused may be the best way to solve a problem. When you are unfocused, it actually helps give your focused brain a rest so that when it's time to focus, you can focus optimally as well.

All this today on Something You Should Know. Something You Should Know. 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 Carruthers. Hi, Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and hello. As 2017 draws to a close, and because of the holiday,

I thought this week would be a good time to recap some of the fascinating intel that we've uncovered in this program during the past year. So this episode and the next one will contain highlights, you know, those real juicy nuggets from shows during the past year, beginning with how to become smarter. This is from episode 46. Dr. Art Markman, he's a PhD professor of psychology and marketing at the University of Texas at Austin, and author of the book Smart Thinking. And he explains how and why some people are smarter than others, and how we can all be smarter.

There are definitely characteristics that people have that enable them to acquire good knowledge. So there are certain people that we think of as being inherently curious, and those are people who will go out of their way to read more on some story that they've just heard about or to ask a lot of questions of people. But even if your natural tendency isn't to go out of your way to pick up knowledge like this, these are skills that you can develop and habits that you can acquire. The advantage to being able to do smart thinking is what? You're able to solve problems better?

I mean, what's the advantage to being smarter, as obvious a question as that may seem? Well, there are a number of advantages to being smarter. The fact is that we are often in situations in which the answers to problems that we've tried in the past don't work for us. And so people in business are constantly trying to innovate. That's the huge buzzword. And yet innovation requires doing things differently than they've been done in the past, and that really requires this kind of smart thinking. But this filters all the way down to anyone who has a problem to solve. If you're trying to fix your car, then you need to know something about the way your car works, and if you don't understand the way the car works, you're sunk. So is there a path to smarter thinking? Absolutely. One of the things

that I talk about in the book is that there's a fairly straightforward formula to being smarter. And that formula involves developing smarter habits. And those habits are to learn more effectively or to create what I call high-quality knowledge, and then to develop strategies to use that knowledge when you need it. And high-quality knowledge means knowledge that you have that tells you how the world works. That's essentially knowledge that allows you to answer the question why. And using that knowledge when you need it means being able to describe the problem that you are facing by really finding the essence of that problem. That is, looking at the problem you're trying to solve, and not just trying to solve it the way

that everyone has in the past, but rather really looking deeply into it and trying to understand what is the nature of that problem at its core. Can you give me an example? Absolutely. So one of the examples I use right at the front end of the book is James Dyson, who noticed in the 1970s that when he vacuumed, that the vacuum cleaner would, the bag would clog and it would lose suction. And almost everyone who played around with vacuums before that would try to fix the bag,

would try and make a more effective bag that wouldn't clog as much. And what Dyson did was to say, what is the essence of the problem that a vacuum is trying to solve? The essence of the problem isn't just trying to build a better bag. It's trying to take the combination of dirt and air that gets sucked into the vacuum and separate the dirt from the air. And there are lots of ways of separating things that don't involve bags. And then he happened to know about the way that sawmills work. Sawmills use an industrial cyclone, and that doesn't have a bag

in it. Instead, the air comes in to a large cone, a cyclone gets created, and the dust gets pushed to the side of the cylinder and then falls down into a receptacle. And he created a miniature industrial cyclone and stuck it in a vacuum cleaner. And that was a pretty smart solution. So how can I become smarter? Sure. The first thing that you need to do to get smarter is to work daily to improve the quality of your knowledge. So that means that whenever you encounter something new, you need to understand the way it works. And the best way to make sure that you understand the way it works is to try and explain it to yourself as you go along.

So if you hear somebody give a really good explanation, try and repeat it back or write it down or carry one of those little digital recorders and just say out loud the explanation to something you just encountered. And if you do that consistently, you will improve the knowledge that you have. And then the second thing that you can do is to spend time really looking at the problems that surround you and try and figure out whether there are other ways of describing that problem that might provide another essence to that problem and suggest a different path or different knowledge that you might have that might help you to solve it. But even that doesn't necessarily ensure success. It's just another way to solve a problem. It might

not be a better way. It might just be another way. Well, that's right. But in fact, if you look carefully at lots of the things that we think of as being smart thinking, they involve finding alternate ways of doing things that had been done in the same way for a long time. Unfortunately, if you look at our education system, we spend a lot of time trying to teach people that there's a correct answer to problems. In some sense, we draw a bad analogy from math. Most math problems really do have a single answer, and your job is to find it. But in almost every other walk of life, there isn't one answer to a problem. There are many, and each answer is likely to have some strengths and some weaknesses. And the better your ability to find multiple sources of solutions

and to use those solutions in new situations, the more likely you are in the long run to do things that other people look at and think were smart. And maybe come up and build a better mousetrap. Absolutely. And maybe make a bazillion dollars doing it. As they say, if you build

a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door. That is Professor Art Markman from the University of Texas at Austin. He is author of the book, Smart Thinking, and if you'd like to hear the entire interview, you just go to our website, somethingyoushouldknow.net, and if you'd like to hear the entire interview, you just go to our website,

somethingyoushouldknow.net, and all the episodes are there. They're numbered, and episode number 46 is the one Art Markman was in. A discussion I enjoyed a lot was the one about magical thinking. I guess because I always thought maybe I was the only one that did it, but turns out a lot of people engage in magical thinking. You know, it's like knocking on wood or having a lucky charm or a lucky sweater. Matthew Hudson has studied this phenomenon of magical thinking, and he wrote a book called The Seven Laws of Magical Thinking and was my guest in episode 51, where he discussed exactly what magical thinking and was my guest in episode 51, where he discussed exactly what magical thinking is.

The technical definition that I give is the attribution of mental properties to non-mental phenomena and vice versa. So, for instance, believing that natural events have a purpose to them, or believing that your thoughts have some sort of force over the world. So examples of magical thinking would include belief in luck or destiny or karma or essences or mind over matter, that sort of thing. Or even just good luck charms.

Exactly, yeah. All kinds of superstitious beliefs and rituals. Does everybody and does every culture engage in this somehow? Yes. As far as I know, every culture has certain magical and religious rituals and beliefs and traditions. And every individual person has a tendency to believe in these sorts of things. Even if they deny it, even if you call yourself a skeptic, you'll still find yourself doing little lucky rituals or feeling like something happened for a reason.

Is there any reason to think it works? Well, I don't believe in real magic, so I don't think these things work the way that people sometimes think they do. But magical thinking can provide a sense of control, and it can make you feel lucky. For instance, if you perform a little ritual, it can increase your self-confidence, and then that might lead to better performance and actual luck, which will then feel like the ritual or the lucky charm had some effect.

And there is research showing that people who thought they were using a lucky golf ball sunk 35% more golf putts than people who thought they were using a normal golf ball. Now that's fascinating. How could that be? Well, the researcher proposed that it increases self-efficacy. So if you think that you're using a lucky golf ball, then you expect to perform well. And then it relaxes you, and then you actually do perform well. And then it relaxes you and then you actually do perform better.

Even the people who don't necessarily believe it, sort of believe it. That's the argument. Yes. A lot of magical thinking is subconscious. So even if you don't think that you believe in these things, these expectations can have sort of subtle subconscious effects on your behavior. Does talking about it like this ruin it? I think there hasn't been a lot of research on whether talking about cognitive biases can actually reduce them. So it's possible that if your defenses are up and you're aware of certain illusions and you realize that they're illusions, then you're less susceptible to them.

On the other hand, it's possible that even if you know about them and you're on lookout for them, they will still play a role in your life. Has anyone, maybe you have, or anyone done the research where you ask people who admit that they believe in it to some extent, where they have lucky numbers, or they have a ritual, or they have a good luck charm, and then ask them, do you really think it works? And what's the difference in the answers? I think that a lot of people will say, I don't believe that this little thing that I do works.

I don't believe that it's magic. I think that's all BS. But I do it anyway, just in case. For instance, personally, I knock on wood. I know that it probably has no physical effect on anything, but it still gives me peace of mind, so I do it anyway, because, you know, no harm. And if this stuff crosses cultures, and as you say, it's probably in every culture, there aren't a lot of places where this doesn't happen, what does that say? Is it human nature to need this?

It seems that it is human nature. Magical thinking is a result of very basic cognitive biases, very basic mechanisms and habits of mind. And it also is influenced by very basic human motivations, the desire to feel some sort of control over your environment, the desire to feel like life is meaningful and that there's a purpose to your existence. So both the habits of thinking that lead to magical thinking

and the desire to believe in magic. Both of those are universal. You talk, though, I mean, it's more than just the, you know, I've got lucky numbers and maybe they'll win kind of thing. I mean, you talk about John Lennon's piano in the book about, I mean, that kind of magical thinking attaches value to a piano or any other example you want to use that that's real dollars yes magical thinking does have very real economic implications the whole industry of celebrity memorabilia people paying a lot of money for

something that a movie star or a rock star owned or touched. So yes, you can see how you can put a dollar sign on how strongly people believe in these sorts of things. Yeah, because, you know, let's talk about John Lennon's piano. I mean, the value of that piano just as a piano wasn't particularly spectacular. If John Lennon's piano had no special history, if it were not John Lennon's piano or if people didn't know that it was John Lennon's piano, it would just be a regular old piano with some dings in it and no one would care. But the fact that it had this history of being the piano that the song Imagine was written on, it sold for a couple million dollars. And it gives people a lot of inspiration when they're around it and they get to touch it.

So believing it makes it so, in a sense. I mean, if you believe this stuff, whether you admit it or not, believing in it makes it so, and since it is so, it's part of who we are. A lot of this is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you believe that something will increase your performance in a certain situation, then your beliefs play out in your own behavior, and so your expectations, in a sense, become real. And that's from episode 51, my conversation with Matthew Hudson, author of The Seven Laws of Magical Thinking. You can hear the whole interview in episode 51.

My wife and I just signed up for HelloFresh, and it has changed the way we eat in our house. Let me tell you what happened when we got started. This box got delivered to my front door with all the ingredients for several meals. All I did was pick a meal and get started. I picked sizzling southwestern chicken with bell peppers and feta crumble. Now that may sound daunting but the recipe card was easy to follow. I chopped some beautiful fresh produce, roasted the chicken, chopped the herbs, put it all together and 30 minutes later I had a delicious

restaurant quality meal everyone loved, all for about $10 a meal. And here's something you should know. HelloFresh makes everything simple and convenient. You choose the delivery date, all the ingredients come pre-measured, and there are three plans to choose from, the classic, vegetarian, or family plan. These are really high-quality, nutritious meals that taste amazing. You have got to try HelloFresh. It'll change the way you eat, and you get $30 off your first week. Just go to HelloFresh.com and use the promo code SOMETHING30. That's HelloFresh.com, promo code SOMETHING30, That's HelloFresh.com, promo code SOMETHING30 for $30 off your first week. In episode 65, I had an eye-opening conversation about social media

because, you know, there's so much hype about social media and how if you want to reach people, especially young people, that social media is how you reach them. Well, not so fast. Marketing consultant Ed Keller has done a lot of research on this. In fact, he wrote a book called The Face-to-Face Book. And he explains how social media does and doesn't work. Our basic premise is that there is an enormously powerful social wave taking place across the country and, in fact, around the world

where consumers increasingly turn to each other for advice and recommendations. We trust our friends, we trust our family, we trust people we know and with whom we have personal connections. That the overwhelming amount of word of mouth that takes place is still in the real world, offline, face-to-face. And while online social media is getting a lot of attention now and it plays a role, it is a small fraction of the total volume of word of mouth. And what we try to do is encourage brands and media and their agencies to understand and take a total social perspective,

understand all the places where consumers engage in conversation and think about marketing strategies and marketing execution from the perspective of how, when, and where those conversations take place. And they still take place predominantly offline and most powerfully face-to-face. But I would imagine that this applies not only to brands and corporations and agencies, but to people too. It absolutely applies to people as well, and it's very interesting when we give talks about word of mouth and we tell people that most conversations still take place face-to-face, and an immediate reaction from many is,

you know, that's so interesting because if I think about my own life, that's how I live my life, but I just see so much in the press about the various online social networking sites, whether it's Facebook, whether it's Twitter, whatever the newest technologies that come along, and I begin to think that, well, maybe that's how the rest of the world operates. And so they find it comforting to know that the research that we've done is consistent with their own lives and their own personal experiences.

And I think everybody kind of knows that on some level in their own life, that face-to-face is better, but email and texting is kind of an easy way out in a lot of cases. Well, technology is there to be used, and it certainly is a convenience for many people, but I also think if you want to be persuasive in your personal life, in your business life, then the best way to persuade people is to do it face-to-face. You not only then get to communicate words as you can through email or through text or through other online tools, but you get to communicate all sorts of emotions that are best expressed when we're face-to-face with each other. There's nonverbal cues that

people pick up. There's the opportunity for, you know, the raised eyebrow, for the real passion to come through. All of these things are enabled through face-to-face communication in a way that they can't be through online tools alone. And how do you know this and that you're just not stuck in the past somewhere that, you know, we should just all be talking to each other? I mean, how do you know? We know about the predominance of offline face-to-face communications because every single week out of the year, year in and year out since the middle of 2006, we are conducting ongoing research where we ask people to keep track of conversations that

they are a part of during a 24-hour period. And we ask them to keep track of whether those conversations take place face-to-face, over the phone, where you're emailing with people, texting with them, participating in online social networking sites. So we asked them to think about the offline as well as the online. And after the one day in which they keep track of all this on a small diary that we asked them to keep, they then participate in a survey with us using that diary-based information as the basis for their report back to us. And we saw in 2006, and we continue to see today, that about 90-plus percent of their conversations take place offline,

predominantly face-to-face. A little under 10% take place online. And that online component is broken up into emailing, texting with each other, or social media. So the social media piece, which many people think has now come to dominate as a communications tool, is actually just about 2% of our conversation. So that's how we know, and I guess our message in the face-to-face book is that we want readers to realize that the original meanings of what it means to be social and what it means to have somebody as a friend isn't just a quaint vestige of a bygone era, but it's critically important to the way that people continue to live their lives today.

And so should things change? Should they change or will they change? Well, both are good questions. Well, in terms of whether they will change, I think it's almost inevitable that there will be a continuing rise in technology-driven conversation, but I think it's going to be decades and decades, if ever, before that comes to replace face-to-face communication. It's just such a large gap now. Should it change? You know, it's hard to say.

I guess a lot of it has to do with what people are most comfortable with, but I think the underlying message is that there is an emotion that can be communicated through offline word of mouth that just will never be replaced by online conversation. And there's some academics who have done a lot of research about this, and when they look at the things that motivate people to communicate, in particular to post things through online social media, what they found is that the number one thing that drives people is social signaling. It says something about themselves. So they're the first to try a new product. They're attending a very cool event, and they want to post something about it.

And so it's as much about them as it is about the people with whom they're communicating. When we turn to the things that motivate people to talk offline, emotional drivers turn out to be the number one thing that drive people to communicate offline. So excitement about something, awe about something, a fabulous experience that you've just been a part of, or maybe something that you've just been a part of, or maybe something that you're angry about. All of those are emotions, and those emotional things are the things that we're really focused on in our offline communication.

So for people in business, I think it has a lot to do with thinking about what's the message that you want to communicate, and if it's around emotional attachment to your brand, then that's best done offline, face-to-face. If it is, if you're a brand that is new and cool and you've got something that you want to get out there and you've got a series of experiences that you're enabling people to have, then online, particularly social networking sites, may well play a role and a very powerful role in those instances.

So it's not either or. We do think it's about both and but we also think it's important to not confuse the amount of press attention being given to Facebook and all the other social networking tools and technologies and to think more broadly and holistically when you're thinking about how, when, and why people engage in conversation. So, Ed, when you talk about face-to-face, I mean, I've never had a face-to-face conversation with anybody from Google or Coca-Cola, and I don't suppose most of their customers ever do. It's not about talking to the people at Google or to the people at Coca-Cola. It's people having conversations with each other about those brands. And that's what we're

talking about here. We've estimated, in fact, you bring up Coca-Cola. Coca-Cola is the most talked about brand in America. And we're not just talking about people saying, oh, I'd like to have a Coke, please. It's people actually having a conversation about Coke products. It's people having a conversation about Coke and maybe some of its promotional activities. It's people having a conversation about new Coke cans that might be coming out. These are all things that people talk about. And so from a marketer's perspective, while it's enticing to think I'm going to have a Facebook page, I'm going to have millions of fans on Facebook, and that's how I'm going to increasingly hope that my brand is going to move product in the marketplace for me, it turns out that not only are there multiples more conversations that people have

offline about those brands, but it also turns out that all sorts of media and marketing activity can help to drive those conversations. Half the time that people talk about brands with each other, they're talking about something in the form of media or marketing that become part of that conversation. So ads that they've seen, something that they've seen in a retail environment, maybe something that they've seen on the product packaging or on the brand's website. So it can be media that brands buy. It can be so-called owned media, the package, the brand website. These are all media that the brands own themselves.

Those are all things that help to spark conversation. And so it's not just about social media, it's about all media having the opportunity to help drive social engagement with the brand. That's marketing consultant Ed Keller, author of the Face to Face book. And if you'd like to hear the complete interview, go to the Something You Should Know website, which is somethingyoushouldknow.net, and you will find episode 65, or you can just search, if you just go to the search thing and just put in the number 65, it'll pop right up and you can hear the complete interview. You know, I've always suspected that sitting down and trying to do your best work

doesn't always work. That sometimes, at least for me, I know my best ideas and my best work sometimes come at times when I'm distracted doing something else or not thinking about anything in particular. So I was delighted to find that there's some real science behind this. In episode 66, I spoke with psychiatrist Dr. Srini Polay. He's author of the book Tinker, Dabble, Doodle, Try, Unlock the Power of the Unfocused Mind, where he talks about the power of not trying so hard, how not concentrating and focusing can produce great results. For a long time, people believed that focus was the most important faculty.

And what we've now found is that unfocus may be at least as important, if not more important than focus. Because in the brain, there are both focus and unfocus circuits, and they need to work together for optimal productivity and creativity. And yet the things that you recommend that people do to unfocus are exactly the kind of things that people think of when they think of someone who's not getting the job done, who's lazy? Well, they may sound like that, but they're not exactly the same. So I'll give you an example. So I'm definitely not prescribing just distraction, because I think distraction and daydreaming by

itself is not necessarily helpful. And there are three kinds of daydreaming that have been studied. Jerome Singer, who studied this since the 1950s, has pointed out that slipping into a daydream is more like falling off a cliff. And having some kind of guilty rehashing of something is also not helpful. But what is helpful is positive, constructive daydreaming. And what's different about this is, number one, you can build it into your day. Number two, you initiate it with some kind of playful or wishful imagery. And number three, it is best done with some kind of low-key activity like knitting or gardening rather than doing it when you are completely wiped out. And these three things will allow you to then withdraw your attention from what's outside, reorient your attention to what's inside. And what studies are now showing is that it activates the unfocused circuit in the brain, which then does what seems like something quite magical.

The moment you start to redirect your attention using positive constructive daydreaming, which can be abbreviated as PCD. You actually change the way the brain operates. And to make this simpler, if you think about the brain like a silverware set, just metaphorically, when focus is on, your brain acts like a fork. It essentially picks up the solid pieces of your identity. However, when unfocus is invited to the table, it then invites a bunch of other silverware. There's a spoon for picking up the delicious melange of flavors of your identity. There are chopsticks which make connections across the brain.

And then there are also things like marrow spoons which go into the nooks and crannies of your brain to find pieces of information that focus would never be able to find. And so with this new set of silverware that the unfocused circuit will actually bring to the fore, you have a much fuller sense of self. And with this fuller sense of self, you can have a greater sense of motivation, you can feel more energized, and also more creative. And that's exactly what the studies show. Wow. And now I'm hungry from your... Right. the studies show. Wow. And now I'm hungry from your... So you said something a moment ago, though, that this works better if you're doing something like

knitting rather than just lying there being wiped out. Am I correct? That's correct. The whole idea about this unfocused circuit is it actually uses 20% of the body's energy. So the brain just occupies 2% of the body's volume, and at rest, it uses 20% of the energy to perform what's needed, meaning all these different things that I just described. And effort just adds on another 5%. So if you have no energy left, then doing this particular kind of activity is not going to actually be helpful because your brain needs that energy in order to do something. So is it kind of like you're distracting yourself from something so that the brain is kind of free

to do what the brain does? Because if you try to think about it too much, you can't really get it. Yes, absolutely. In fact, the reality is that most experts would agree that between 90 to 98% of mental activity is unconscious. And I think we've spent a lot of time, I think, in learning at schools and organizations, focusing on just the 2% of conscious learning. And essentially, what I'm describing in this book is how do you actually get into this 90% to 98% of what's happening under the radar and begin to develop those circuits. And because the brain does most of its intelligent work

under the radar, we really need to be able to work with those circuits to get the results that we want. You know what this kind of reminds me of, and you tell me if this is a reasonable analogy, is you know those pictures, those computer-generated 3D pictures that if you try too hard, you can't see it, but if you kind of let your vision unfocus, all of a sudden, you get it? That's exactly right. You know, it's exactly right, and I think it's that kind of metaphor that applies. You know, it's like using low beams and high beams. You basically need both in order

to navigate any terrain. Or if you're on a stage, you need a spotlight and sometimes you need floodlights. And I think what a lot of people do is they operate in one or the other mode, either super focused or very distracted, not recognizing that when you are unfocused, it actually helps give your focus brain a rest so that when it's time to focus, you can focus optimally as well. Well, and you talked about doing things like knitting and gardening and that kind of thing, but the title of your book makes it sound as if we don't have to specifically have a hobby. You can just doodle and just anything else to kind of take your mind somewhere else. That's correct. In fact, doodling has been shown to increase retention of

information 29% more than not doodling. So there was a study by Jackie Andrade that actually looked at two groups of people while they were listening to a tape, and they had to remember names and places that were actually mentioned during that tape. And what she found was that the group that doodled remembered 29% more than the group that did not. And in part, you know, I think that's a balance between focus and unfocus. You're not so focused that you're going after everything and anxiously forgetting, but you're not completely off task because your mind is on the page and so your mind is somewhere in the vicinity vicinity grasping this information and then integrating this.

In fact, one of the main functions of the unfocused circuit in the brain is to actually pick up memories and to integrate them. So even when you're doing something like doodling, that's helpful. And I think with dabbling, there are a lot of examples of dabbling where people have dabbled in different fields and actually had major discoveries. So, for example, Albert Einstein dabbled in the mathematics of Poincaré. And by using what we call possibility thinking, he extended Poincaré's theories to actually develop the theory of relativity. Poincaré developed his theory based on what he could see. And then when there was no more evidence, he stopped. Albert Einstein said, what if? So he asked a possibility question and by just dabbling in the mathematics was able to make a connection with his own field in physics.

And similarly, Picasso, by studying and dabbling in the mathematics of Poincaré, was also able to think about the fourth dimension, and this started the Cubist movement in art. So even though these were not their primary modes of interest, simply by dabbling, they were able to make connections in their own fields and feed their own imaginations to move their own fields forward. So yes, it doesn't necessarily involve daydreaming. The whole idea is that if we remain fixed in our interests, and if we remain fixed in the way we think about things, we're not likely to get anywhere fast. And just as a point in question, you know, there's been a lot of talk about grit recently. And there's now been a meta-analysis that's looked

at grit. And grit has two components to it. One is consistency of interest, which is stay at what you do, never leave it. And the other is persevere, which is try hard. And what the meta-analyses have shown of more than 60,000 people is that grit only has a weak correlation with success. And in particular, the piece that has to do with consistency has no correlation with success at all. And so what I want to do in this book is encourage people to follow their interests, to measure their meanderings, to find ways in which they can meander that can help their unfocused brains get them exactly what they want to get. That's from episode 66. It's a psychiatrist, Dr. Srini Polay, and his book is called Tinker, Dabble, Doodle, Try. You can hear the complete interview by going to episode 66 on the Something You Should Know website.

And that brings us to the end of this best of episode of the Something You Should Know program. Some of the highlights from this past year, and I'll have another best of episode later this week. I'm Micah Ruthers. Thanks for listening to Something You Should Know. Hey, hey, are you ready for some real talk and some fantastic laughs? Join me, Megan Rinks. And me, Melissa Demonts, for Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong? We're serving up four hilarious shows every week designed to entertain and engage and, you know, possibly enrage you. In Don't Blame me. We dive deep into listeners' questions, offering advice that's funny, relatable, and real.

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