Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 157: Adam Grant, The Benefits of Generosity

Episode Date: October 17, 2018

Kindness has a bad rap, often being viewed as a sign of weakness. But Adam Grant, an award-winning researcher and Wharton's highest-rated professor, tells Dan Harris good guys don't have to finish last. In fact, Givers, those willing to help others, are often the top performers in their field of choice. Later in the interview, Dan and Adam engage in a thoughtful debate about the benefits of meditation. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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I'm Dan Harris. Our guest this week wrote what has been for me one of the most influential books I've read in a long time. And I've actually read it many times. As I've said before in the show, I'm writing a book about kindness, out of my take on a non-anon, woe gooey take on kindness. And Adam Grant wrote a book that has landed in a really positive way with me. It's called Give and Take, and it's all about kind of the question, do good guys finish

last in the office? And he talks about being a giver in a professional environment and whether that works in your favor or not, and not to steal his thunder, it does. And also it doesn't, but there are ways in which if you do it right, it can make you incredibly successful to be kind and compassionate and generous and grateful in a professional context. And in this interview, you'll hear him talk a lot about how you can operationalize that in your own life. So also, he has publicly trashed meditation.

So we get into a really, we get into a really civil discussion about that, which I found to be super interesting. He has a lot of interesting things to say on many levels and I feel like I made a new friend. So much more from him coming up. Let's do some voicemails first. Here's number one.

Hi, Dan. This is Robin. I live out part of Phoenix, Arizona. I have a question about loving kindness and meditation. We have been really trying to incorporate this at the beginning of my meditation time, you know, sending out compassion to different people, maybe happy, maybe healthy, all that. And I like it. But I find myself getting stuck on deciding who to send the good thoughts out to.

I start with myself and then someone who has a strong meeting in my life. And then I spend a lot of time kind of relating myself for not being able to really focus on a neutral person. And maybe it's because we're kind of isolated and not really get out much or maybe I'm just a self-involved jerk who doesn't pay attention to people around me. But I have a hard time deciding a neutral person and sometimes I can't think of a difficult person either, but I feel badly that I'm calling that person difficult, or maybe they're just difficult right now, or maybe I'm the one of difficult. And so I just basically kind of want to know how you choose the people that you focus

on for that implementation. And is it cheating to kind of think up ahead of who you're going to pick or is it supposed to be whoever floats up in your mind at that moment? And do you use the same people over and over again? I just want to hear more about how you practice this, especially if someone like me who's not as touchy-feely about this as I imagine some other teachers of this are. So that's my question. Thank you so much. I really appreciate everything you do and your podcast and your books is making a huge difference in my life. So thank you. Bye. Thank you. I love the question. I love that. Good on you for even attempting to do this as a fellow anti-sentimentalist. I love that.

Good for you. So it's a hilarious question. It's completely natural. I would not be beating yourself up. I'll tell you what I do and maybe it will help. So what I do is I basically do the same people every time. So I don't have to have any real negotiation about who's going in which slot.

You know, I always start with myself and then for the benefactor category, which is usually the next category, it's either my mom, my dad or my brother. And then the dear friend category, which is next, is always my three year old son. And then I add a slot for my wife which completely just I do it. That's not saying anybody else has to but I just decided to do it a while ago and that's just the habit that's formed and then the neutral person is well I'm not gonna say who it is but let's just say I always do the same person and it's somebody that I historically had kind of overlooked.

And so I've put him in that category and it's always him. And then the difficult person sometimes changes based on what's happening, but I've gone years long stretches where it's always just been the same person. So I think, and I'm not going to say who that is. And then the last one is all people. So that one is pretty easy. So yeah, don't beat yourself up. Try the technique, you know, try. It's not cheating. If you always, you know, if you know, in advance who you're gonna do, I don't think that's cheating in my opinion. As a try, my method and just whatever you do don't give up on the practice because as kind of annoying as it is, you know, this systematically envisioning people and sending

them good vibes, thing can be pretty annoying. It, you know, there's science that suggests it has all sorts of benefits. All right, here's voice mail number two. My name is Jennifer. I live in Gilbert, Arizona, and I will join the course of people saying I love your podcast. So my question is, I've been focusing a lot on mindfulness, probably more so than meditation and just with a busy schedule and you know, that excuse you here all the time. So I feel like being more mindful has been awesome.

It's really helped me, but I also have found that I'm a lot more selfish because everything that happens to me, I'm always like, okay, well, how do I feel about this? And I feel like I'm kind of constantly taking my temperature on things. I just feel like I'm constantly thinking about myself when I'm used to kind of thinking about others. And so I'm wondering if you can give me some advice about that. Thank you so much A bunch of things to say about this. I'm guessing now, but it sounds to my ears like maybe maybe and I could be wrong about this but Just slight digression. I got dinged recently for having the habit of saying

As a disclaimer, I could be wrong about something and then going on to send every possible signal that I don't think I'm wrong. But in this case, I actually, I mean, I don't know you, so I really could be wrong about this. But it sounds like there's a possibility you're confusing mindfulness and self-analysis. Mindfulness would be sort of a non-judgmental awareness of the raw data of your sensory experience at any given moment. So you're walking between meetings, you're feeling your legs moving, you're feeling the wind hitting your face, you're feeling

the movement of your arms, you're noticing what kind of random thoughts are coming up, the urge to grab your phone, and then every time you get distracted, you're starting over and over and over again. What I'm calling off the cuff here, self analysis, would be thinking about how you feel about that's what I heard you describe, thinking about how you feel about everything that's happening. That seems to be a different thing. Not necessarily bad, but I could see how it might lead toward a self centeredness that would stop you from being available for other people. Whereas I think mindfulness, this, you know, the,

where you're not so much engaged in the habitual storylines and really more available to whatever's coming up right now and seeing it all as clearly as possible. Mindfulness seems like something that, that should at least in theory, make you more available for other people. That again, I don't want to be clear, there's nothing wrong with analyzing both internally, either internally or you know with a friend or a shrink, how you feel about things in your life. But I personally find that that has value, but for me it's not as valuable in terms of an ongoing practice that I want to emphasize in my life because the analysis comes naturally to me for

better or worse. The being awake and aware of everything that's happening from the boring to the awesome to the horrible, which I would define as mindfulness. That is a harder thing to do in my experience and really a skill that needs to be generated. And so I would urge you, because you said you were doing less meditation and more mindfulness, which I hear as less formal meditation and more off the cushion in the real world, free range, trying to pay attention, mindfulness, I would urge you to try to establish a semi-regular, short, short, short formal practice, because I think it will supercharge your ability to do mindfulness off the cushion.

So, one minute daily-ish is usually what I recommend. Try to get one minute a day of formal meditation most days. It doesn't have to be every day and That will I think bring you back to what mindfulness really is in its purest form when you're doing it Formally eyes closed seated not trying to do anything else and on the 10% happier app We've got all these one minute meditations. You don't need an app, but you can use the app if you want But you can also you know the basic instructions for beginning my, my fullness aren't super complicated. Try to, you know, sit comfortably close your eyes, feel your breath coming in and going out.

And then when you get distracted, start again. So you can do that by yourself. Or again, use the app where I was looking for customers. So I would, I think if you integrate that into your life, the formal practice, I think you'll have a easier time doing the off the cushion free range mindfulness, which is unquestionably super useful. All right, again, I hope I was hearing you correctly, and I appreciate the question and your kind words.

All right, let's get to our guest this week. Adam Grant really, really enjoyed this conversation. As I said, I've gotten an enormous amount out of his work. He is, here are his credentials. He's a psychologist. He's a professor at the Wharton School, which is at the University of Pennsylvania. His special T is organizational psychology. Apparently, according to the internets, he was the youngest tenured professor at Wharton School, which is a pretty prestigious spot. I spent some time with him recently, as I went down to do a story at Wharton with him on generosity in the workplace for Good Morning America. We're doing a series of reports on Good Morning America about happiness and little hacks that can make your life better. So I went down to Wharton

with a TV crew and he did an exercise with his students who are amazing. These are graduate students at the Wharton School of Business and he did an exercise that showed it's an exercise in what's called a five minute favor. The actual the formal name for the exercise is Givitas. It was developed with some other shrinks and the exercise basically involves everybody gets together and writes down something they want. You know a favor they would like to have done for them on a big sheet of paper and then you hang the sheets of paper all over this lecture hall and then everybody walks around and signs their name on the sheet where they think they can help

that person. So the requests ranged from I have a little brother, I've had trouble connecting with him. Can anybody advise me on talking to a younger sibling to I want to feed the entire city of Philadelphia on Thanksgiving? Can you help me with that too? I want to be on the bachelor. Can you help me with that? And by the way, I did sign my name on that because I work at ABC and this is where the Bachelor is Broadcast and so I actually might be able to help this kid get on the Bachelor So it's a really cool exercise. The point of which is that first of all if you get a bunch of people together You can get a lot of needs met through crowdsourcing But also to show that it feels really good to do easy favors, a five minute favor for somebody, and that actually it can improve your life

and in a professional context, it can help you build a really healthy network. If you are willing to do easy favors for people, it doesn't derail your productivity, but it does create a lot of good vibes in your network and that can have reputational benefits that really last and reverberate. As I mentioned, Adam has also created a little controversy in the meditation world because he's a pretty open meditation skeptic. So this makes him a bit of a different guest for our show, although I would argue that his, that I think of meditation as a practice as something you do in order to improve your life.

And he talks a lot about compassion, generosity, and gratitude in the workplace context as a practice that you do to improve your life. So I think it's right in the center of the Bullseye for this podcast. Nonetheless, I've been, I was slightly taken aback by some of the things he said publicly about meditation. Uh, didn't in any way reduce the the impact that his work has had on me, but I did want to to probe him on it a little bit. So toward the end of the interview, we get into that. So a lot here and like I said, it's had a big impact on, and I hope it does on you. Here we go, Adam Grant.

All right, well, thank you for doing this. Thanks for having me. As I said, I'm a huge fan. I've read this book. I probably read it three or four times. Why? Because, well, first I read it because I was really interested in it, but then I started working on a book about kindness,

and this is one of the most important books in the genre in my view. There are not a lot of books about kindness that are any good. Thank you. If you told me five years ago that Dan Harris would read my book I would have fallen out of my chair. It's a huge honor. My pleasure. It's funny. I avoided the term kindness in the book because it sounds really weak and I thought, ah, that's a great way to undermine the strength of the caregiver. What's why does kindness have such a bad rep? I think that it's associated with do-goaters and bleeding hearts.

There was, I get this all the time actually that you know people say oh yeah but you know if you're kind, people walk all over you, they can take advantage of you, it's almost like a neon sign saying to takers, yeah, screw me over. And so as a result, I think people stereotype it as dangerous. How did you get interest in the subject? Because I think your interest from what I understand goes way, way back. Yeah, it goes pretty far back. I'm sure you've had this experience too. I have so many different moments that now in hindsight,

I think, oh, that must have shaped it. I don't know which one's really mattered, but I grew up in a family where I was stunned by acts of generosity that were small, but meaningful, so my mom was kind of an exercise fanatic. And one day, she wanted to go work out, and there was a snowstorm. And my grandmother, it's a 15-minute drive

from where she lived. And my grandmother drove to watch me and my sister so that my mom can go work out. Took her two and a half hours to make the 15-minute drive in the snowstorm. But she said, you know what? My daughter wants to work out. I'll break the blizzard.

And I think there was those kinds of moments, every time I saw them, it was just really uplifting. And when I think about the role models that I had in life, it wasn't just the people who were brilliant or accomplished. It was the people who were unnecessarily and unusually generous. And I always thought it would be amazing to understand how we could bring more

of that in the world i'm do do the thing that i hate one other people do which is make it all about me for second and i apologize in advance for you and i will call you a taker until later well you can start and you can i'll own it right now uh... i mean i'm not want to say that i'm like thoroughly rotten but but I have some trouble understanding why both my parents are physicians, they're definitely givers, really kind,

and I would say they pounded that into me as a kid, but I would not say that I've grown up with kindness and generosity as, you know, what gets me out of bed in the morning. Is this your rebelling? I don't know. I don't think so because they didn't lecture me about it. Maybe they should lecture me more.

Interesting. So why do you think that's not a core value for you? I don't know. I mean, this is what I'm kind of, it's not like I get nauseous if I'm generous or anything like that. I don't wanna overplay my hand on this but i fear especially feared read as reading your book

that maybe i'm on the wrong side of this equation uh... i've accomplished my mission right my fear was that a bunch of takers would read the book and say i'm a giver all good and so i think actually if you're questioning where you stand to me that's the first sign that you care about where you stand. Right, but is that me just carrying reputationally? Maybe. Maybe.

I think though that if you cared reputationally, you probably already would have changed it. So do you really believe that not being a giver has this caused reputationally damage? Well, you seem to be doing pretty well. I do okay, but as we discussed before we started rolling, I had a big moment of waking up because I got this 360 review done. So we hired this company that we did it as part of research for this book that I'm working

on that I can't find a title for. And we hired this company where they interviewed, did 16 anonymous interviews with people in my personal life and in my work life. And in my work life, they interviewed people who were my boss, people who were my peer, people who worked for me, and the results were really tough. I mean, again, it didn't say that I was, you know, himmler, but it was really, really tough to read. And so am I suffering reputational damage? I think so. Maybe, but not severely enough that you were aware of it

before, right? I don't know. I wouldn't have called myself Mother Teresa, so I was some vaguely aware of it. But I wasn't as keenly aware as when I read the report. So what does that mean? What were the worst behaviors they got called out? That, by the way, I'm not that kind of psychologist.

No, it's OK. It's OK. I'm not expecting too much. Well, I'm expecting a lot, but not just on that score. On this score. Dismissive that I am impatient, that I kind of get in my head and idea, and I just kind of want everybody to get on board, and I don't really listen to feedback,

which I feel myself doing, and I really don't like about myself. So I'm really grateful for this report that I'm gonna attack that, but that's, I think, a big problem. What I find really unusual about this is that this comfortable just admitting it. I think if this were all about reputation, you would be going out of your way to say, all right, maybe I'm a taker,

and I need to become a better faker. It's a terrible strategy to come out there. If your goal is to improve your reputation, the worst possible thing you could do is to say, I'm an a**, right? So why? Why are you telling people this? Why are you admitting this to me?

Well, I'm gonna write a book about it. You know what? I guess on some level, first of all, I think motivation runs along a spectrum. So I think on some level, I, on the cross end of the spectrum, it sounds like a good book. I've had some experience writing books before, and I kind of have a sense of what works, and I think self-disclosure went done correctly, as long as you're not like vomiting up everything. But if you tell it in an amusing way, it's a great way, it's a great vehicle for a message. But I think the other part of this, and this is going to expose me for maybe being less

of a jerk, and I advertise, I really care about the message. And I've been meditating now for nearly a decade, and I have seen how it's made me kinder and gentler to sound like George Bush, the senior. And I believe that that makes you happier. And I think there is a way to talk about kindness that's different than it's normally talked about. A way that you are, I think, the exemplar of talking about how there's a selfish case for kindness.

And so I'm willing to talk about my warts because I think it's all in service of a really important thesis. Got it. So you are willing to sacrifice your reputation in order to get people to experience the joy of being kinder. Except, I don't think it's masquerading as a sacrifice because what I've learned from writing the first book about being a co-caduette panic attack on television is that actually it's fine. People aren't that interested in me.

The story is kind of mildly tittling, but what they want to know is do you have something that's of use to me? And on that first book, I was confident that I did. And so is the premise here that you're now causing other people to have panic attacks with your dismissive heads? Yes, probably. Yes, probably. Yes, sir. At least anxiety.

It's fascinating. So I guess, I mean, there is, I think you're right, reputationally also, because there's some research suggesting that we love redemption stories. And that, you know, the fact that you're willing to say, look, this is who I've been, I don't want to be that person, I'm going to try to be better, and I'm going to create a whole movement of other people who are going to get behind that. That probably, you know, give you to some moral movement of other people who are going to get behind that. That probably gives you some moral credits. So maybe you are doing this for so many years.

Yes, that's great. That's what I'm worried about. You should worry about that. I think if you don't worry about it, it probably doesn't lead to healthier motivations. Well, so I want to, before I have a million other questions, but let's just establish the basic concepts in the book. Sure. Talk, break down, give us, takers, and mattress.

So I think about these as styles of interaction. And there's nobody who's a pure giver, a pure taker, or a pure matcher. But I think that we all have default tendencies, which is how do you treat most of the people most of the time? And I think the givers are the people in your life who are constantly asking, what can I do for you? They're showing up.

They're helping solve problems. They're listening and providing, right? They're showing up, they're helping solve problems, they're listening and providing emotional support, they're making an introduction, they might help you get a job, and they're the people who you know have your back and they don't expect anything in return. They do it out of joy or because they believe it's the right way to live.

And then the opposite is a taker that somebody who basically says, what can you do for me? And they're constantly trying to get ahead. They're trying to impress powerful people, and they're really motivated to be self-serving. And then most of us are afraid of being on either extreme. So I don't want to be too selfish. I don't want to be too generous.

And so at least it worked with the majority of people due is they decide, I'm going to be a matcher. So I'll trade favors with you. And if you do something for me, then I'll do something for you. And that way, I'm going to be a matcher. So I'll trade favors with you. And if you do something for me, then I'll do something for you. And that way, I'm fair, right? I follow the law of reciprocity. You did some research in terms of who was the most successful based on these styles, and the results were kind of surprising.

Yeah, they were. So I looked at data on the productivity of engineers, the revenue of salespeople, even the grades of medical students. And I found that the givers were consistently the worst performers. And when you think about that, we all know givers who either just burn themselves out because they're just doing other people's work instead of their own, or who just become doormats at the hands of takers. And I have a salesperson who I found in one of my studies, this guy had the highest giver

score in his whole company when I had people rate each other, and he had the lowest revenue of anybody, and I had to ask him, how do you explain this? Why do you suck at your job? I didn't ask you that way, but he just said, look, I just care so much about my customers that I would never sell them one of our crappy products. You do see givers who are afraid to impose on others and who allow other people constantly to take advantage of them and they end up living their lives on other people's agendas instead of their own.

And so I thought then if the givers are the worst performers, who are the best performers, and the good news is it wasn't the takers. If you looked at their success in each of these jobs, they tend to rise quickly and they also felt quickly. Because at some point, people found out that they were takers. And then the beauty of mattress is, if you really believe in justice, you believe in an eye for an eye,

when you meet a taker, you feel like it is your mission of life to just punish the heck out of that person, and be the sort of justice. And so, mattress would actually punish takers by warning people about them, and spreading kind of reputational gossip. And so, the takers actually punish takers by warning people about them and spreading kind of reputational gossip. And so, the takers eventually would often run into these walls where everybody knows and nobody wants to work with them, nobody trusts them, nobody wants to hire them, etc.

And so, I thought it must be the maters who were the best performers. But they weren't. And every job I have studied, it was actually the givers again who are at the top of the performance spectrum. So, the least productive engineers were givers, but so were the most productive engineers. That was true for the sales people who brought in the least revenue, highly generous. Also the sales people who brought in the most revenue were highly generous. And I just, I thought this was a fascinating paradox, right?

That there are ways that you could be helpful to others and kind of sabotage yourself, or you could help others in ways that elevate your own success, and I wanted to understand the difference. So what is the difference? I think it boils down to, so at first I thought it was just ability, right? So really brilliant talented kivers do just fine. People who struggle with their jobs don't. But in a bunch of my studies, I controlled for intelligence and I controlled for skill,

and we still saw the disparity. And so, I think what it is is it's probably three choices, more than anything else. It's about who you help, how you help, and when you help. So the who question, failed givers are helping anybody who asks, and they end up helping takers too much. And that actually reinforces the taking behavior and only motivates them to keep taking more.

And the successful givers are being a little bit more discerning, right? To say, look, I recognize that not everybody's motivations are generous. And so if I encounter somebody with a history or reputation of selfish behavior, I'm going to be more cautious with that person. Maybe I'll even become a matter in that relationship

to hold them accountable for contributing their fair share. And they reserve their generosity for the givers and mattress who they know will pay it forward, or pay it back, or both. The how is kind of about the question of, do you give in lots of different ways and become a jack-of-all trains, which a lot of givers do? And then they end up both stress-tooth-in

and also giving in ways that don't really add unique value. The successful givers, they would say, look, I've got two or three ways of helping that I enjoy and excel at. So for me, that's sharing knowledge about work in psychology, and it's making introductions between two people who'd help each other. I love doing that. And what I will do when somebody will ask me, can you mentor me?

Or can you, a common one, is can you give me career advice? Actually, I don't know you that well. I'm not comfortable giving advice to people that I know extremely well. So the answer is, I used to just say yes. The answer now is, no, I don't think I could be helpful there. But if I could share some book recommendations

on career choice, I would be happy to. If I can help you find somebody who would be a really excellent mentor for you, I'd be glad to do that. And I think just setting those boundaries to say, look, I'm in a given way that energized me rather than exhaust me. I'm in to give in ways that I can have a unique impact. That's important. And then the last part is just when you help. So failed

givers drop everything whenever a request comes in. And successful givers are much more vigilant with their calendars. And they say, look, I've got time blocked out to get my own things done. If it's an emergency, of course, I'll respond. But then I'm going to have separate windows available to show up and support other people. Why are successful givers the most successful overall within a company? So as far as I can tell, in the data, there are three reasons. The first one is there's just a clear social capital benefit. So you may not want to be a giver then, but you want to work with other people who are givers, right?

Because you know that they will go above and beyond. They'll do things that are not in their job description, but actually really beneficial to you or your team. And so the givers are constantly sought out. They're the people that you, when you have a choice about who to work with, you ask for them. They're the people that you trust to be your subordinate

or your boss. And so they just end up with better reputations and better relationships as well, and that's huge. Most people are mattress, remember, by default. And so if you were a giver and most people are motivated to reciprocate, that means you get more back. The second thing is motivation. That givers have, they have more meaning in their jobs

and their lives, because they feel like there were contributes to something larger than themselves. They're able to say, look, my job may or may not be that beneficial to other people, but the time I spend trying to support other people and help them, that makes me feel like that time is well spent, and it gives me a sense of purpose or worth. The most surprising part is learning. It turns out that if you are a giver, the time you spend solving other people's problems

actually makes you better at solving the organization's problems. Because you end up doing all these things that you have to pick up new knowledge and skills for and then you get an expertise advantage over time. But on the three things you just listed, I think it was three things about why successful givers are more successful, sort of writ large.

One thing you didn't mention, but you go into in depth in the book, is that it can also reduce burnout. That if you, if you feed, well, why don't you explain it? No, I actually think that's the flip side of the motivation and meaning story, which is that, you know, if you are a giver and you feel like you are having a meaningful impact

on other people, that's a source of energy. So I found, I studied fundraisers and firefighters and teachers, and I found that there's a big stereotype that if you give too much, you will burn out. And that is true, if you give in a way that's totally selfless or self-sacrificing. So the givers who end up burning out are the ones who always put other people ahead of themselves. But there's another group of givers who says, you know what the ones who always put other people ahead of themselves.

But there's another group of givers who says, you know what, I'm going to help other people in a way that's good for them, but I'm going to try to make it not costly for me. And I'm going to say, look, I'm ambitious for myself and I'm ambitious for other people. And they said boundaries in their helping. And they actually end up with more energy than the people who are mattress and takers. And I think part of the reason for that is there's a in psychology it's called the helpers high or in economics it's the warm glow of altruism. But we get joy when we're able, it's not necessarily just spending time trying to help other people, it's seeing that you made a difference. We get joy out of that.

When I studied fundraisers, they're raising money for a university and they have no idea where that money goes. And I randomly assigned them just to meet one scholarship recipient and talk about how his life was changed as a result of their work. The average call are more than doubles in weekly revenue and weekly time spent on the phone. And they're picturing that guy and thinking, I want to help that guy go to school. And as a result, that job is now much more energizing than it was before. Within this context, how do we understand the old saw that the road to hell is paved by good intention? Oh, I mean, I think that there's no question that that's true.

You know, I think what happens to a lot of people is they get asked for help. They say yes, and then they get a reputation for being, you know, both willing and able to help. And pretty soon, no good deed goes unpunished. And, you know, you have this, this And you have this army of people trying to bombard you with all these requests. And that's a really good way to burn yourself out. I think, though, that back to the idea of boundaries. What you see, I think a lot of people

don't do this instinctively, but they learn it over time. What I've heard over and over again from people that I've recognized as both accomplished and generous is they say, I was just terrible at saying no at first. And now I recognize that every no is a chance to say yes when it matters more. And so, you know, if I can ward off all the requests where I can't make a unique impact or that aren't in ways that are meaningful and motivating to me, then I can give on my terms and I can actually get energized by it, rather than a constant bite.

The problem here, and I say this as somebody who's in touch with his own selfish impulses, is, it seems like there's a little bit of a catch-22 here, which is that, I understand it, in order to be, when you talk about how givers are so successful, I want to be a giver because I want to be successful, but you can't be a giver if you're looking to gain. Maybe. I'm not sure. So, I think it's complicated, right? And this is sort of a philosopher's paradox. I do think that if you say, look, I want to be a giver

so I can get ahead, it's not going to work, because people will see through it. And you're only going to help in ways that are strategic for you. And you end up missing out on all these opportunities to help people who maybe you think now can do you no good, but who knows where they will end up tomorrow, or next year. And so I think it's limiting in that way because you end up with a very narrow network.

And you only say yes to opportunities that seem instrumental. I think, though, the other thing that's interesting about this, which I didn't know this when I wrote Give and Take, but I feel pretty strongly about it now, is there's a difference between wanting something back each time you give versus having this world view that says, look, I believe in karma or dharma

or what goes around comes around. And the first, if you say, look, I'm going to give so that I can get things, you more or less end up becoming a matcher. And then you're keeping score of every single interaction you have, which gives off this transactional vibe. It's like, hey, you know, Dan, you didn't really care about me. You were just helping me so you could get something from me, which, you know, doesn't create a deep relationship or any goodwill or gratitude. If you though, what I've seen with a lot of givers, and Adam Rifkin's probably a good example of this, if you walk around believing net if I help more people

I will be more successful but you don't keep score or expect anything back from any of those individuals I think you're fine right because you're saying look I wouldn't do this if it caused me to fail but I'm going to do it because I enjoy helping in that way or I care about this person or I see an easy way to contribute and I don't think there's anything wrong with that. So can I be a giver and still just, again, I don't think I'm thorough goingly, if that's even a word, self-irredeemably selfish, but I'm aware that I have a lot of selfish motivations.

But I can still be a giver. Yeah, of course. But it's not the first thing I think of when I get out of bed in the morning. I don't think that makes you a bad person. But then it does, it disqualify me from being a giver. No, of course. But it's not the first thing I think of when I get out of bed in the morning. I don't think that makes you a bad person. But then it does. It just qualifies me from being a giver. No, I don't think so. I think that so, you know, look, there's some people who are naturally empathetic and, you know, their first instinct, whatever they meet someone is, is how do I help them? But in some ways, that's actually the easy road, right? Because if that's the way you're wired,

then, you know, I don't know that you're getting any credit for having the right biology that makes you a new image. I think that what's actually more impressive is when somebody says, I am going to do this against my constitution. This does not come naturally to me, but I think it's important or it's important to the people who care about me or I think that for whatever reason, this is a principle that I want to live by and then it actually takes effort for you. I have more respect for that

uh... if you just do it because it's who you are well i'm definitely in the category of it being against my constitution on some levels i guess i would say my motivation isn't necessarily because i want to be more successful i want to have better relationships and i want to be happier myself great that you think counts as that i think that absolutely counts and i think that you know too often we have these there's's a friends episode where Phoebe tries to find a truly altruistic act, and she can't find one. I think that's the wrong debate.

I actually don't think we want people to be altruistic, because then they end up sacrificing themselves, and they run out of energy to give. I think what we want is to say, look, actually the most sustainable giving is when you care about the other person that you're helping and you enjoy it and that way you're going to be motivated to continue doing so you end up falling uh... i think the nut of the book really comes down on on being

other ish yeah i don't know if anyone should have ever used that that's what i think the opposite of selfish that's what i was going for yeah i mean i think would i think if you say you know being selfish is always looking out for number one and putting yourself first, and being selfless is completely neglecting yourself, I was looking for a term that would say, look, I would love it if more people live their lives being other focused, but I don't want them to be completely other focused. You need to consider yourself too, and that's why other issues jumped out at me.

And it just speaks to the overlap of self-interest and altruism for lack of a less triggering word. Yeah, that's the goal. And I think most people, just like you said, you have selfish impulses. And I guess you also have generous impulses. Yes, for sure. For sure. I don't want to caricature myself as being, again know, again, I said this before, I was being like, irredeemable.

I don't think that's the case, but I'm aware of how much selfishness is there, not only for my own reflection, but also from reading this report. So you mentioned Adam Rifkin. Who's that? So, how much do you tell the one on it? Go for it. All right. So, when I was writing Giventake,

I was looking for examples of really interesting givers. And I had just talked to David Hornick, who's the opening story in the book. And I thought, you know what? Similar values tend to flock together. Let me stock his network. I literally looked up David Unlinked in, and I went through all his connections.

And I saw this guy, Adam Rifkin. And I paused for a second because it said Fortune's best networker. I didn't even know that was a thing. And I thought, oh, this is going to be a great story of some taker who's, you know, going at using people and accumulating all these powerful connections. And sure enough, you know, he had, he basically was connected to every tech founder of the past 20 years. He also knew the former chef of the Grateful Dead. I don't know why you want that person in your network, kind of a fun fact, right?

And he had, the way that he became Fortune's best network or was they did an analysis of the Fortune most powerful people lists. So the Fortune 500 CEOs, Fortune's top 50 women in business, and so on. And Adam was connected to more of those people than anyone else on LinkedIn, except I think a few maybe LinkedIn employees, but he actually had more powerful connections to people on the fortune list than even Jeff Weiner of the LinkedIn CEO himself.

And I think that, you know, I was just curious, who is this guy? And I looked up his profile and it said said I think his tagline in the time his first line on LinkedIn said I want to improve the world and I want to smell good doing it. Okay, I want to mute this guy, he sounds interesting. And then I noticed that all these people had written him LinkedIn recommendations, talking about how he had changed their lives. And you know, he'd given them great advice. He'd made an introduction so that they could get their startup

off the ground, or they could find the perfect tech person to build their app. And I just got the more I learned, the more intrigued I got. And it turns out he's a kind of, you've defined everything I thought was true about great networkers. So he's a pretty shy, introverted computer engineer in Silicon Valley. He was addicted to a TV show called Star Trek, growing up as he might have guessed. He owns a few patents.

He once built super computer applications for NASA. And what's amazing is his first startup was funded at $50 million. He started two other companies and was able to retire in his thirties. But instead of just going off sailing somewhere, he built a network of aspiring entrepreneurs and engineers and just said it's open. We'll have these meetups at a bar. Anybody wants to come. You can show up.

I'll try to help you if I can. And the norm is, we all pay it forward. And he's had thousands of people come to this now. And so I just thought Adam Rifkin was such an interesting example of somebody who's been both very successful and very generous and I wanted to understand how he did it. How does he do it? Well, I think the probably the most powerful thing I've learned

from Adam is this idea of the five minute favor, which was such a clean way of capturing what I was trying to say about how to be a successful giver. I think so many people believe that you have to be mother Teresa or you have to be Gandhi if you want to be a giver. And Adam's saying no, there are opportunities every day to help somebody in ways that are really beneficial to them,

but not that costly to you or maybe even beneficial to you. You know, simplify minute favors. You go out of your way to recognize or recommend someone who has really impressed you. You show appreciation or gratitude to someone. You give a quick bit of feedback. You make an introduction to one of my favorite things to do for years. Adam, actually, at one point, said a goal that he was going to make three introductions

every day. And he did that for over a decade. If I counted correctly, he did made 12,000 introductions. And at one point, we just did a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation. And there were dozens of companies that had been started because he found you, the collaborator that you needed. And what's great about the introduction is he used to get harassed for all this business plan advice.

So people knew him as a successful and kind entrepreneur in the valley. It'd get these emails that would say, dear Adam, dear Adam, you know, I know you by reputation. I'm trying to start a company. Here's my business plan. You know, it's only 242 pages. Please read it and then meet with me for coffee. It doesn't have time to do any of that. And he realizes at some point that if he's more proactive

about his giving, and he offers five minute favors on his terms, that it'll change the dynamic. And so he started making these introductions and pretty soon he gets known for having great connections. And now the dynamic changes. So in his reputation is not, oh, he's a nice guy. You can bother him for anything. It's he's a great connector.

And why would you go to the Forson's best network for business plan advice when the most valuable thing he could offer you as an introduction? And so as he makes more introductions, he gets fewer and fewer business plan requests. And so one of my takeaways from him is we can all do more five minute favors. I think he's brilliant at them finding ways to help others that are low costs for him. But also he's picking the five minute favors where he can do things that other people can't. And so instead of just being the person that takers reach out to, they think, okay, I want to be thoughtful about what I ask of him.

So you and I just came out of a room full of Wharton MBA students, where you were doing a five minute favor, Lala Paloza. Can you explain what that was? Yeah, so it's called Givitas. It was invented by Wayne and Cheryl Baker in Ann Arbor, Michigan. And the exercise is pretty simple. What you do is you try to get everyone in a room to make a request for something they want or need but can't get on their own. And then you challenge the rest of the room to just say, look, try to be a giver, use your knowledge or your network to fulfill the request.

And what I think is awesome about it is you see, first of all, I never would have expected any of the requests that came in. We had people who were asking, can I be the bachelor, which knowing Dan that you probably had connections was a very smart request. It was kind of you to offer to help them, although maybe it just makes a good story for the book who knows. Maybe both.

Maybe both, could be true. Yeah, why not? I hope it's both, in fact. You know, we had people who wanted to meet their favorite chef. We had people trying to feed every person in Philadelphia who was homeless on Thanksgiving. You know, the range of requests is staggering. And what you see is very quickly, there is everyone in the room sees a couple requests and they say, oh, I know something or someone that could help.

And so you end up getting all these problems solved. And when Wayne tracked this, he found that on average, when you did this in companies, people would estimate that it saved them $50 to $100,000 after doing this exercise for just an hour or two. And that it would also save them you know 50 to 100 hours of time just to you know to show up and say let's all help each other. For podcast listeners who weren't in the room with us in Good Morning America's cameras as we shot this the way it works is you write them on the on these big sheets of paper and post it up on the wall and then everybody goes to

write the requester on these big sheets of paper everybody goes around and signs off on the ones they think they can help and then the requester will go back and circle back with the people who have offered to help. Yeah, I'm excited. No, I've been participating just recently in the new online version that we created. And what I've loved about the Givetoss app

is it takes me five minutes to log in and scroll through the group that I'm in to say, okay, what are all the requests that people submitted from their phones? And then, what in the world could I possibly be helpful with? And it's become one of my go-to-ways to do a five minute favors, just say, okay, let me log in and see what people I know need

who are in this community with me. So, I will say that walking around and looking at the favors I signed up for some of them, but I really gravitated toward the ones that were going to be quick. And like feeding everybody in Philadelphia on Thanksgiving, I thought, okay, that sounds pretty detailed. And I do worry generally that a lot of the favors that get asked of me are not five minute favors.

They're really big asks. Like what? Come give a speech to my group out in some place that's not easily accessible or. I love this request. Yeah. You know, or I need, I want to go have a coffee with you because I'm interested in your book or whatever.

And all these things are on theory, things that I would like to do, but I wouldn't get anything done if I said yes to all of these, and yet I feel guilty saying no. I don't think you should feel guilty. I think that this is something that Revoli and I have worked on a lot. He's an applied positive psychology expert who I've worked with since before give it take him out.

And one of the things that we noticed is when people got increasingly visible or increasingly busy, the volume of requests for most people would go beyond what they had time for in the day. And so then you have two choices. One is you can prioritize. So my version of that was saying, who am I trying to help?

Family first, student second, colleagues third, everyone else fourth. And what that means is, if I get a request to give a speech from a stranger, if that's going to detract from my ability to be there for my family or my students or my colleagues, that's a no because I'm basically taking from the people I'm closer to and care more about to give to somebody else. What if it just detracts from your ability to do your job?

That would be another reason to say no. So I've rarely had that problem in the sense, though, that I'm pretty vigilant about my rules for productivity. And so I try not to mess with that. So how do you adopt this five minute favor philosophy with maximum success? So I think this goes to the other thing you could do beyond prioritizing, which is you wanna figure out how you can scale your time

and make it more efficient, so that it doesn't. You don't have to keep redoing the five-minute favor. So whenever somebody reaches out to you for those coffee chats, what would be much better than just saying no to each of them individually is you write up a one-page FAQ where you take the most common questions you're asked and you say, OK, here are the answers. Or you even have that conversation once

and you say to the person who's on the other end of it, look, I'm happy to do this for you if you're willing to pay it forward. And can you write up what you learned from me? And then I will share that with future people who asked. Or another way of making that more efficient is you say, all right, I might get 20 of those a week. And I will invite all those people to a Google Hangout.

And I'll answer all the questions once as opposed to having a bunch of separate meetings. I see this all the time with mentoring. That you can mentor three people, but it's really hard to mentor 30 people. Why not have group mentoring sessions, right? Not only do you get to learn from the questions that other people ask, you're helping them build a peer support network. One of the other tips you offered in the class that I thought was really interesting is that

we'll probably derive more joy from chunking the five-minute favors together and doing a couple hours worth of favors one day a week as opposed to sprinkling them in throughout our schedule. Why is that? This is Sonia Lubomirsky's research. We don't know for sure yet, but what seems to be the case is that if you're trying to do a little bit of giving every day, it just kind of feels like a drop in the bucket. And you can wonder, am I having any impact at all? And you kind of get sidetracked from the work

you're trying to do. Whereas if you have that one day every week that's your giving day, you know that if you give to five people on Thursday every week, you know that on Thursday, you are going to have a meaningful impact on someone's life. And so I think it energizes you. I think it's also a lot easier to stay focused and say, all right, I know I've got that time blocked out.

I'm not expecting to work in that window. And so, it's a lot easier than to say, all right, this is my giving time. And then I'm gonna go back to whatever my other priorities were. But the bottom line of all this seems to be that pretty much all of us, even those of us who think we may not be as generous

as we should be, can train ourselves into being givers? If you want to. Yes, if you want to. I mean, I actually don't think it's that hard to shift in the giving direction, because if you think about it, right, yeah, you might have a style and you might say, you know, my first instinct is rarely to just say, how can I be helpful? But these are choices we make in every single interaction.

And so, Dan, if I were you and I wanted to kind of build a habit, I'd say, all right, what are the situations where I've actually enjoyed being helpful in the past? And maybe it even caught me off guard. Let me now offer in those particular ways. Or who are the people that I always feel good about helping? And I say, you know what? That was actually a good use of my time.

They asked me for something that's in my wheelhouse and they expressed a lot of gratitude afterward. Maybe I start by helping those people and doesn't take very many five minute favors each week for that to become familiar and maybe even have it. I don't know if this counts, but one of the complaints in my 360 was that my door at the office was often closed because either I'm on a call or frankly often meditating. You meditate at work? I do, all the time.

We have to talk about that. We can talk about it. What I found is doing less meditating at work and just keeping the door open and having people and going to more sort of group meetings and just being overall accessible and available. Even if it just means stopping and having a 60-second conversation with more people that I cross paths with in a hallway. This isn't a five-minute favor, but it's a little bit of an overall kind of posture in the workplace has actually made me much happier.

Oh, that's interesting. So why? I don't know. You have a string of positive interactions. You feel good. I think would be the answer. Yeah, so there's a sense of either social connection or you're getting some kind of energy out of the interaction.

That's right, that's right. I like having fun. Turns out you like people, even if you don't want to. I do. Yes, yes. And so I don't know that I'm actually helping people per se, but I'm creating connections and relationship of people. And I find that that's really energizing,

and so I don't know if this counts as what you were describing is trying to build a habit, but certainly something I've noticed. I think I'm torn on it, so I think of the one hand, it's, I look at that and I say, okay, that's really just kind of being nice or friendly. It's not being helpful, because it's not clear that you've done anything for anyone.

But you might be signaling a level of approachability, or a lack of selfishness in a way that leads people to be more open to you. And maybe that changes the way they interact with you. Maybe they're more likely to ask you for help then and you get roped into being a giver against your will. Who knows. You said this before we started rolling that this isn't about being nice. You're not even like that word.

I hate it. I actually don't want people to be nice. I want them to be helpful. And this has bothered me for at least a decade that whenever I've talked about the work that I do, and I've say, look, giveers make up the majority of the least successful people, but often also the majority of the most successful people. People will say, oh, so you're saying

that nice guys and gals can finish first. No! It's not about being nice because that's a whole separate personality trait called agreeableness. Agreeable people are warm and friendly, they're polite, they're welcoming, disagreeable people, more critical, skeptical and challenging. And I think we stereotype givers as agreeable, right? If you're nice, you're also helpful. But they're completely different. The agreeable The disagreeable personality is much more about your, it's your disposition, it's your instinct, you didn't choose it, and it's kind of your,

how people experience it when they first meet you. Like, is it pleasant to interact with you or do they feel like you're kind of prickly? But giving and taking are much more of your values internally, right, though those motives deep down that you choose. And so there are disagreeable givers out there who you might perceive as, you know, at first glance, jerks, or they're really tough on you, but they're challenging because they want

to be helpful. And I think, you know, there are also a lot of agreeable takers out there who are deadly because they're nice to your face and then they stab you in the back and they're really great at kissing up and then kicking down. And then I have to wonder if you are not in fact just disagreeable. And that's the impulse that makes you feel like you're kind of an ass. And people are overreacting to your personality, but not saying you seem to have some giving values if you want to actually do more of this kind of behavior.

Yeah, it may be. It may be. Okay, if you're really disagreeable, you would have said, hell no, I'm not disagreeable. But, well, somebody in the 360 described me as a frosty doing wonder, Maybe if you were really disagreeable, you would have said, hell no, I'm not disagreeable. Well, somebody in the 360 described me as a frosty-doing wonder, which I think is true. Oh, interesting.

I think if you were from the Midwest, you would give off much more in the agreeable vibe. But I don't think anything wrong with being nice or agreeable, but if it's masking a taking behavior, then I would say that it's just as ingenuous. I think that's right. I also think that people who are nice are much more likely to get stepped on. So agreeable people, for example, they do worse than salary negotiations and they literally

get paid less because their instinct is to say yes to everything. How do you avoid that? I think that the easiest way, as somebody who's highly agreeable myself and having spent years teaching negotiation classes to try to figure this out. The easiest way is you find somebody else that you're trying to advocate on behalf of. So when I negotiated my salary, I was representing my family. And I feel like a much bigger jerk if I let my family down, then if I'm tough in, you know, a dialogue with an employer. One of the other interesting things in the book, having to do with giving that

those just really center the bulls eye for me as I think about my own deficiencies was the posture that that givers take toward mentoring. So one of the things I got was that I can be sort of binary in my thinking about people that I can sort of put people in these buckets of their smart person or they're not a smart person or whatever. And but in your book you're right in a really compelling way about the fact that a giver, givers are often very successful mentors and that's because they're poshier if I'm understanding you're right, you're writing correctly is that everybody has potential. Yeah, and you just look at them as can this person

bloom? Yeah, I think that's right. I think, yeah, for the most part, I think that what you see with givers who are great leaders or bosses or mentors is they do see more potential in other people than those people see in themselves. And you know, there's what we have half century evidence whether you are a manager or a teacher. If you have higher expectations of the people who are below you, they're much more likely to rise to meet them. You raise that their own goals. You end up also challenging them in ways

that you wouldn't have otherwise. And so you give them a chance to develop their skills. And then as they, over time, if you give them those chances to succeed, they're much more likely than find that that reinforces your confidence in them and their confidence in themselves. And so there's this kind of self-fulfilling prophecy or virtuous cycle that kicks in.

But I think they're caveats, right? Not everyone has potential in every area. And so again, I see a lot of givers make the mistake of thinking, hey, I can turn anyone into a success and anything. You and I are not going to be in the NBA. No, I mean, I still would like to play in the NBA, but it's just not happening.

So for me, then, I clearly have a demonstrated pension for kind of rushing to judgment. You would say that instead to really look at people as, is within reason as having the potential to bloom, and so I'm going to give you help and I'm going to have expectations. Yeah, and I think this is where your disagreeableness, if it exists, is actually an asset. To be able to say, look, if you're really agreeable, you'd say, look, I see a ton of potential in you, it's totally fine if you don't reach it. And you feel bad about sort of being hard on the person.

I think the thing that I've admired so much about people that I've come to see as disagreeable givers is they will challenge you in order to help you. And so I would see you saying as a mentor, look, because I see potential in you, I'm going to, you know, I'm going to be demanding, which is really different from being demeaning. Stay tuned more of our conversation is on the way after. Hey, I'm Aresha and I'm Brooke.

And we're the hosts of Wunderys Podcast, even the rich, where we bring you absolutely true and absolutely shocking stories about the most famous families and biggest celebrities the world has ever seen. Our newest series is all about drag icon RuPaul Charles. After a childhood of being ignored by his absentee father, Ru goes out searching for love and acceptance, but the road to success is a rocky one. Substance abuse and mental health struggles threaten to veer Ru off course. In our series RuPaul Born Naked, we'll show you how Rue Paul overcame his demons and carved out a place for himself as one of the world's top entertainers, opening the doors

for aspiring queens everywhere. Follow even the rich wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music or the Wondery app. All right, let's talk about meditation. You have written in New York Times, and then you did a little op-ed on CBS about your beef with the meditation world. Tell me what it is.

So what happened was, yeah, as an organizational psychologist, I get called into various workplaces and people want me to try to help improve not just success but also well-being. I care a lot about the quality of work life. It's why I got into this field. And I kept getting asked, should we adopt an meditation program? You know, and pretty soon, okay, we've got McMindfulness here. Is this really going to do any good?

And then I want to just define McMindfulness for you. I mean, it's sort of like, it's like adopting the fad and saying, look, we're gonna do mindfulness lightness. So, you know, we might sit and say, oh, for a couple of minutes and we'll do that once a week and we expect it to change everyone's lives, but we're not really gonna embrace the hard hard work, the intense focus and all the practices that normally go

along with mindfulness meditation or any kind of meditation practice. You know, so I think it's lip service, I guess, mindfulness is sort of lip service to meditation without really meaning it. It's kind of like being a fake giver. I got invited then, I guess this is about five years ago, four years ago, to the World Economic Forum in Davos. And there were all these CEOs meditating. And as I ran into people, they said, oh, are you going to the morning meditation?

And I just said, no, I learned meditation when I did karate as a kid and I never really got anything out of it. And I just was kind of bored. And they just started judging me. People were like, what do you mean you don't meditate? What's wrong with you? How could you not do it? And I just try to take as a social scientist,

when my experiences are fundamentally different from somebody else's, the person I want to be is really curious. And so I just try not to be defensive, and I would just say, well, why? Why did you do meditation? And the things I heard back were so to me strange. Like one of the most common answers was, well,

I'm trying to quiet my monkey mind. I don't hear voices in my head. Maybe some people do. But I've just never had that. And I don't know if it's because- You don't get distracted. Very rarely. In fact, I have the opposite problem,

which is my college roommate used to, they coined a term called Shouldering, which was, I'd be sitting at my computer working, and they'd literally be throwing a party behind my back, and I wouldn't notice, and they just talk to my shoulders. I have laser focus. That's awesome. Yeah, there's a writer sometimes, I'll sit down, and I'll write for 14 hours without getting out to my shoulders. I have laser focus. That's awesome. Yeah, there's a writer sometimes I'll sit down

and I'll write for 14 hours without getting out of my chair. Wow. And so, you know, I just didn't understand it, right? I realized I'm an outlier in that respect. Huge. But to assume that I have this constant set of voices in my head that are distracting to me. Do you have any urges that you wish you didn't have?

Yeah, I think everyone does. That's a voice in your head. Yeah, but it doesn't stand in my head that are you know distracting to me or or just that you wish you didn't have yeah i think everyone does that's a voice in your head yeah but i see it doesn't it doesn't stand in my way right so i was afraid of public speaking before i came became a professor and what did i do i went and volunteer to give guest lectures in other people's classes to get over the fear and said i'm just gonna practice this until it becomes second-ature yeah uh... i mean that's amazing no no i I just, I think it's functional, right?

Otherwise, I'm going to be held back by all of my fears. Do you ever check your email in the middle of a conversation with somebody else? I have caught myself doing that occasionally. You ever eat something you don't want to eat? Rarely. So you sound very disciplined. Yeah, I mean, I think it's one of the things that, you know,

I think is sort of a chord to my identity and probably something that has helped me in my job a lot. But it was just back to the meditation thing. It was just funny because they were assuming that I needed it for something. And then I said, OK, well, it's not like I don't have things that call me down. I think I'm actually a dispositionally, I'm an extremely

anxious person, which is one of the reasons that your work has regained so much for me. I'm like, oh, wow. There are other people who also go through these extreme bouts of fear or nervousness. And I just had different ways of dealing with it. I exercise, and I read, and I find that getting absorbed, and I remember I read the first three Harry Potter books in a weekend when I was in college. And I literally, I finished the third book, I think there were only three at the time.

I was mad that Hogwarts wasn't real. I was so into it that I forgot. And like that to me is, functionally, I think it does the same thing for me that meditation does. And so I read all this research that said that meditation has benefits yet. There's no evidence that it has unique benefits and there are lots of things you can do to get the calming effects, the mindfulness, the stress reduction. And so I just thought, look, don't judge me for being a non-meditator. I won't judge you for meditating.

I just said a lot of things. You said a lot of things. I'm curious to hear what you're talking about. A lot of things I agree with. A lot of impressive things about the nature of your own mind if that I'm jealous of. I would say, no, but don't be jealous because I think this kind of discipline is killer for creativity.

It just destroys my ability to think outside the box because my thoughts are really linear. And I think that productive people have very high attentional filters. We keep everything out. Creative people have low attentional filters, right? And they're constantly making connections between disparate ideas where I'm like, nah, I'm not going to pay attention to that. I'm focused here. high-attentional filters, we keep everything out, creative people have low-attentional filters, right? They're constantly making connections between disparate ideas where I'm like, nah, I'm

not going to pay attention to that. I'm focused here. I'm working. Leave me alone. Yeah, I bet you benefit a lot more from these kind of unexpected, yeah. I probably do. So, what I'm about to say about anxiety, I don't know if I have evidence for, but just from my own personal experience, I actually, having suffered from anxiety, and depression,

and substance abuse, and panic, all of it, for my whole life since, you experience, I actually, having suffered from anxiety and depression and substance abuse and panic, all of it, for my whole life since I can remember, I do actually think there's a difference between the impact of absorption and an narrative or exercise both of which I do, which is that when anxiety shows up in your life, you can't control when it's gonna to show up, and you can't always go running or go back to Harry Potter in those moments.

And meditation kicks in then, which is it gives you the distance from your own repetitive habitual thought patterns so that when that stuff is, when your ego is regurgitating that stuff, you can say, oh, this is anxiety, I don't need to act on it. And that can change the way you parent, can change the way you are with your colleagues and your bosses. And I don't think it's a panacea, but I do think it's a different, you said before,

there are lots of ways to reduce anxiety, but mindfulness may not be unique. I actually think it's unique in that regard. In the fact that you can use it on demand. Sometimes. And it's available on demand, you may not always that you can use it on demand. Sometimes. And it's available on demand, you may not always be able to use it on demand. And so I don't think, again, I really want to be careful,

it's not a silver bullet. Right. But it is, it has the potential to be available in ways that exercise or reading or talking to a loved one aren't always accessible. That's fascinating. I have had so many meditation conversations because I went out on a limb on this one. No one has ever said that before.

I think that's a really good point. And I hate to eat my words. I'm just thinking through, what do I do in those situations as an alternative to meditation? So I think, when I get nervous before a big speech, for example, what I'll often do is I'll call someone who, you know, I know has a calming effect on me. And that seems like it's available someone on demand. Or, you know, I'll do what in psychology we would call deep acting, where, you know, I think about,

okay, what's the emotion I need to feel in order to display the right one? And then, okay, so I don't know if this even qualifies as meditation, but I'll think about, you know, the, like a common one for me is, I'll think about don't know if this even qualifies as meditation, but I'll think about, you know, the, like a common one for me is I'll think about why I got into this field in the first place, or how ridiculously overjoyed I would have been

six years ago if I had any idea that anyone would want me to talk about this work. Like, wait, there's an audience waiting to listen to these ideas. How cool is that? And I think, I don't know, is that meditation? No, but I think it sounds really adaptive and really smart. It seems to work most of the time.

Yeah, but it's possible that meditation would call me down more. Well, I'm not here to convince you to meditate because I think it's a terrible strategy. I'm only just reacting to the arguments you made. But the way you're just approached it makes me more motivated to consider it. Well, I think because you highlighted a problem

and there are many in the meditation world, which is often people become very annoying when they start meditating because they start pressurizing. Why do you think they do that? I think it's the emphasis of being mindful. I think it's the impulse is positive. It's helpful for people. Many people find it very helpful.

And therefore, they wanna talk about it, the same way they wanna talk about the benefits of going into ketosis or psychedelic drugs or the shrink they love or crossfit or whatever, that we find something that we love and we want to evangelize. And I think my instinct is that it's a positive impulse, but that it's the results are really negative. Why do you think, though, then, they're so defensive about the fact that, you know, look,

we've had decades of research on mindfulness now. I'm sure you saw the mind-nipe pepper that said, hey, a lot of these studies are really flawed. They're good control groups. You know, who knows what's, you know, maybe they're a placebo effects. What wouldn't a mindful person just say, you're right, we don't know how often it has benefits for whom and what situations, but I get a lot out of it that's what they should say

you think so yes i think that's what they should so i would never have taken on the topic if they said that uh... yeah well i think it's a i think it i think it i mean i think if you talk to yeah i think there are a lot of people who our meditators who've looked at the science who would say exactly what you just said which is the sciences early stages i think it demonstrates it suggests that there are long list of benefits that are on offer

but it's not going to be the same for everybody and it's not going to have you barfing rainbows the rest of your life it's not going to solve all your problems that's just not the way it works here's here's my critique of what you wrote in the times and what you said on CBS. I think on the merits, the arguments are correct, which is that people can be very annoying when they argue from meditation. My response, though, was as a fan, which is, you are one of the good guys. You have earned a position of a platform and a position of power through doing really

good work. And so I was a little, maybe cringes a little bit that you would use that power to trash something that is actually helpful. And it just seemed like a waste of your power, even though your points were correct, it was a bit of a thin read. You know, like, yeah, it's true.

People get, oh, release, Ellas, when they're arguing from meditation. even though your points were correct was a bit of a thin read you know like yet true people all get over these elizment are going for meditation does that deserve the the downside of having that in the u.a. times is that a lot of people will read that and say now i don't need to meditate because adam grant who i respect said it and i think from my inbox that did not happen right well i think you just heard from the angriest people who

yes got upset about it but i just didn't that effect didn't seem to be a positive one for a guy who's, the bulk of your work is so, so positive. That's my reason. So interesting that you say that. I have a couple of reactions to it. The first one is that that makes me sad, right? Because I certainly don't want to, I try to be really clear in the piece and say, look, it appears to have a lot of these benefits

for a lot of people. I just don't want you to force it on anyone, because there's nothing that works for all the people all the time. And I wouldn't want to dissuade anyone from meditating. The second thought that occurs to me is, I struggle with this a lot, and the this being, I'm a social scientist.

I think my responsibility is to look at the evidence and interpret it accurately. And I don't actually want to be known for being posthum. I don't want to be an optimist. I want to be a scientist. I want to be neutral. That's why I think there are a lot of people who could have written, given, take,

and said it's good to be a giver. And it's why it was so important to me to say, actually, it's a double-aged sword. You can fail as a giver. You can succeed written, given take, and said it's good to be a giver. And it's why it was so important to me to say, actually, it's a double-edged sword. You can fail as a giver, you can succeed as a giver, right? So I think everything has unintended consequences, and there are lots of quote unquote positive things that actually are quite negative. And so I've run into this every once in a while

when I'm critical of something that I think is emotional intelligence as a good example, right? I think there's a lot of evidence that emotional intelligence is important. It is vastly exaggerated in the way that people claim it's more important than cognitive ability. There's literally zero evidence that that's true. And on average, it seems if you want to predict somebody's job performance, their cognitive

ability matters about five times as much as their emotional intelligence. And so I feel a responsibility to correct that argument, right? And say, actually, no, that's not true. It's not to say this isn't important, but let's be reasonable here. And I felt that with meditation a little bit. I think that the other thing is, I do think there was maybe an occasional positive side effect, which is I'm sure you've seen some of the study

is suggesting that meditation is harmful to some people, that they get trapped in some kind of cycle of remination. And I didn't encounter anyone like that, but I've had a number of people approach me who I know and say, I don't know a lot of people this, but I'm stressed out. People tell me to meditate all the time. I've tried it and it kicked it.

It didn't work for me. And I feel like there's something wrong with me. And you gave me permission to feel like, it's okay to know that. I would say that's a negative impact. You think so? Yes, because actually what those people need to hear is you have been taught the wrong way. Maybe. And because the study I know the authors of the one study that indicate that indicates.

The will be written. Yes, I will be as a friend of mine and Jared have been on the podcast. I think it's true that in rare cases, meditation can have deleterious effects, but what those people are saying to you is something different. If they're not saying I had a psychotic episode, what they're saying is I couldn't get into it,

and often the people who can't get into it it just hasn't been explained to them correctly. Those people often need to hear, oh, you were getting distracted a lot. Oh, well, that's the nature of the mind. Noticing that you've become distracted is succeeding at meditation. Now try it again.

And I find that, I mean, having spoken to tens of thousands of people in person about this, having that explained to people, the lights go on. That's unquestionably a light bulb moment, right? And I think that I probably did a disservice to people by not highlighting that, which is just not something that was salient to me at all, right? And I think that I probably did a disservice to people by not highlighting that, which is just not something

that was salient to me at all, right? What distractions? I just come at this from such a, I think, an unusual perspective that's hard for me to process. Prove laged. Apparently. But I think that the other,

there are one of the people who told me that, this was just a struggle, is one of the most successful people in America, you know, the top executive of a major company and extremely accomplished, and you know, has no trouble achieving pretty much any goal. And you know, for that person to say, you know, I feel like there's something wrong with me that I can't meditate to say, you know, you've actually been doing quite well, but also, I know this meditate to say you've actually been doing quite well, but also is like, I know this person to be extremely happy and they don't seem stressed out or anxious.

And so the fact that they're living their lives thinking, things would be better if only I'm meditated, it's assuming that there's something wrong, right? And I don't want to assume that. No, I think it's, well, first of all, I don't think you need to meditate only if there's something wrong. But I also, I mean, I think it's really important if you're, as I am, an evangelical for something to be relaxed about it, you know? And not to say you have to do this or you, therefore, in sufficient and some important way. I think that's a really negative thing to say. And it gives the license for people to get sort of pissed off about the way we talk

about meditation. Yeah. Anyway, I don't think we need to beat a dead horse here. No, this is the most convincing conversation I've had about meditation. Okay. Cool. Well, I guarantee you've been trying. If I try it, it's your fault.

If I go back and give it another shot. I'm claiming you. I guarantee you've been more impactful on me than I will have been on you. You know, I think that counterintuitive thing that you highlight so well is that giving, which many of us associate with a sort of renunciation, actually can make us happier. Yeah, I think giving can make us happier. I mean, Dan, have you ever had a moment where you help someone and felt incredibly good about it? the time you're paying attention what is it feel like when you hold the door open for somebody feels good in that moment

why were wired that way because we're cooperative species yeah i mean darwin wrote and if darwin said it you know that he's the last person you expect to say it darwin wrote that uh... if you have a whole tribe of altruistic people that they will outlive selfish tribes because they'll put the survival of the tribe first. And so, even though individually there might be some disadvantages of being generous on

the whole, right? Yeah, I think we are wired to say, look, let me be helpful to at least the people I know or the people who are in my group. And then, you know, we could go beyond that. But I think the joy of giving is partially, I think giving is something that energizes us in part because we're wired that way. I think it's also energizing because it shows us that we matter. Right?

If you're able to do something that helps somebody else, it says, look, your time has value beyond you. And we know that that is the single biggest driver of meaning in life is to feel that you matter. Pleasure talking to you. You definitely won't mind. Thank you. I appreciate it, great job.

Okay, that does it for another edition of the 10% happier podcast. If you liked it, please take a minute to subscribe, rate us. Also, if you want to suggest topics, you think we should cover or guests that we should bring in, hit me up on Twitter at Dan B. Harris. Importantly, I want to thank the people who produced this podcast, Lauren Efron, Josh Cohan,

and the rest of the folks here at ABC, who helped make this thing possible. We have tons of other podcasts. You can check them out at ABCnewspodcasts.com. I'll talk to you next Wednesday. Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and add free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today. Or you can listen early and add free with Wondery Plus in Apple Podcasts.

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