Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 392: How to Fight Languishing (at Work and Everywhere Else) | Adam Grant

Episode Date: November 1, 2021

This episode officially marks the launch of the Work Life Series, a brand-new, five-part series that’s all about how to live better lives at work. In each episode, we’ll be hosting meditation teachers, thought leaders, and top-of-their-field scientists to explore how to better connect with coworkers, boost our on-the-job resilience, and bring mindfulness to our work. And to help you put into action what you learn here on the show, you can join our free Work Life Challenge: a new meditation challenge specifically designed to help you navigate your life at work, available exclusively in the Ten Percent Happier app. Download the app here or wherever you get your apps to join the Work Life Challenge for free. To kick things off in the Work Life Series, we’ve got a longtime TPH fan favorite: Adam Grant. Adam is an organizational psychologist at The Wharton School and the #1 New York Times bestselling author of multiple books, including his most recent, Think Again. He is also the host of a hit podcast from TED called WorkLife. In this episode, Adam will talk about languishing, some of his ideas for what to do about it, why and how to rethink flexibility at work, and much more.Please note: There are brief references to alcohol & substance abuse and multiple references to anxiety and depression in this episode.Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/adam-grant-392See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Again, one of the most widely shared articles in recent memory was in New York Times op-ed piece written by my friend Adam Grant. The headline read, there's a name for that blah you're feeling. It's called languishing. So many people sent this to me. It hit a nerve in a big way.

I think that's because so many of us have been feeling a nameless on we, a general sense of being off in large measure due to the pandemic, of course. So today we're bringing Adam on to talk about what languishing is, how to spot it, and how to fight it with a particular emphasis on how to deal with languishing as it pertains to our work life. This is actually the first in a five-part series we're doing on work. We're calling it the work life series, and it's all about how to work safely and successfully with minimal suckiness. about how to work safely and successfully with minimal suckiness. Many of us, of course, spend more time with our work colleagues than anybody else in our lives,

including spouses, kids, friends, and relatives. So in this series, we're going to talk about a whole range of hot button issues, including productivity, imposter syndrome, our relationship with technology, how to give feedback, how to handle jerks, how to approach sensitive diversity issues, and of course, how to get feedback, how to handle jerks, how to approach sensitive diversity issues, and of course, how to knit meditation and mindfulness and compassion into all of this.

To be clear, and I want to be super clear about this, we are defining work very broadly here. Maybe you have a typical office job, or maybe you stay at home with children, or maybe you're retired and doing volunteer work, every episode in this series is for everyone. And there's more here to help you put into action, what you're going to learn in these episodes. I'm excited to announce our free work life challenge over on the 10% happier app. It's a new meditation challenge specifically designed to help you navigate your work life. Here's how this seven day challenge will work every morning starting next Monday, November 8th.

You'll get a short video from me in conversation with one of two incredible meditation teachers, Don Mauricio and Matthew Hepburn. Each video will be followed by a guided meditation from either dawn or Matthew. The meditations are about 10 minutes long and are specifically designed to help you practice what you've learned in the videos. Of course, meditation is not going to magically erase

all of your work drama, but it might give you the resilience and clarity and focus to make more skillful moves as you navigate the messy reality of working with other members of homeless aliens. Your home base for all of this is, of course, the 10% happier app.

Download the app right now wherever you get your apps to join the Work Life Challenge for free. And now to kick things off here on the Work Life Series on the podcast, we've got longtime TPH fan favorite, the aforementioned Adam Grant. Adam, for those of you who are unfamiliar, is an organizational psychologist at Wharton and the number one New York Times bestselling author of multiple books, including his most recent think again. He also has a hit podcast from Ted, which as it happens, is also called

work life. In today's episode, Adam's going to talk about languishing, how and why to achieve flow, how to push for flexibility at your work, tricks for optimal functioning of remote teams, the latest research on Zoom fatigue, and something called collective effervescence. We'll get started with Adam Grant right after this. Before we jump into today's show, many of us want to live healthier lives, but keep bumping our heads up against the same obstacles over and over again. But what if there was a different way to relate to this gap between what you want to do and what you actually do?

What if you could find intrinsic motivation for habit change that will make you happier instead of sending you into a shame spiral? Learn how to form healthy habits without kicking your own ass unnecessarily by taking our healthy habits course over on the 10% happier app. It's taught by the Stanford psychologist Kelly McGonical and the great meditation teacher Alexis Santos to access the course. Just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10%.com.

All one word spelled out. Okay, on with the show. Hey y'all, it's your girl, Kiki Palmer. I'm an actress, singer, and entrepreneur. On my new podcast, Baby This is Kiki Palmer. I'm asking friends, family, and experts, the questions that are in my head. Like, it's only fans, only bad. Where did memes come from?

And where's Tom from MySpace? Listen to Baby, this is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcast. Dr. Grant! Hey Dan, it's great to see you. Congratulations, you know since the last time I saw you, at least two huge and amazing things have happened for you. One is the book was a huge success. And two that are called language, which was so awesome, one super viral. So congratulations on both. Thank you, I think.

Yeah, well, what do you mean I think? Absolutely. They seem like two unmitigated goods. I don't know. I feel like there's a big gap between people reading something and them actually benefiting from it. Or at least a big question mark, right? So a lot of people recognize their languishing. Does that necessarily make them better off? Maybe, maybe not.

People get excited about thinking again. Are we any less polarized? Are we any less attached to our opinions? I don't know. So for you, it's not just good enough to have reached a ton of people, which you clearly have done. It is okay, that's great, but what's the impact? Exactly. Yeah, and sadly, it reaches much easier to measure. Yes, but it sounds like you have concern about impact.

I think I have a minimum some skepticism and curiosity about impact. I think books have real impact, right? I think it's pretty clear that the pen is not always mightier than the sword, but the ink does seem to last longer. People reread books. They share them in various forms. Can't always hand them anymore, but I think articles disappear really quickly. And it's one thing to have a bunch of people click on it and maybe

read it and talk about it. It's another thing for it to really shift their daily behavior or even alter their psychological states, which is partially why we're here, right? I mean, I guess I haven't thought about it as much because frankly, I'm so crass that I'm mostly just concerned with the reach in numbers because that's really believed that, do you, Dan? Well, yeah, I'm being partially facetious, but not entirely.

I really do look at how are the books doing and how are the numbers on our episodes. I can see my mind going in that direction. Yeah, but we all do that, right? Yes. It's the only measure we have. But if you knew how many people were genuinely happier as a result of listening to this show,

you would pay attention to those metrics too, and I think you might even care more about them. I would, that's true. I guess my point is that my view really is that it's a little bit like seed planting. The causality here will be very tough to, yes, I'm get letters and I'm sure you get them too that say something to the effect of this thing you did change my life. I think that's pretty rare. I think what really happens is it's an accumulation of information that starts to change people.

And a seed has been planted and maybe in 10 years, somebody has some sort of crisis in their life and they remember that book they read by you or they remember something I said and it has more salience. That's kind of the way I think about it. I actually love that framing of it because I think it puts reach in its place, but it also reminds you that reach is not an important because it means you're planning more seeds.

I would love to do the experiment though. Can we randomly assign some people to listen to 10% happier and then follow them over time? I think there's actually a really interesting set of trials to be around there, but that might be a conversation for another day. I would love to have that conversation with you. We should have it, although we can't be the ones to do the experiment, but I bet we can find

some independent researchers to put us to the test. Speaking of work life, your podcast, we are doing a series on this show called The Work Life Series, which is why we wanted to have you on. And there are a couple of things I wanted to talk you about, including languishing, but also an article you wrote for the Wall Street Journal recently about flexibility. So you made such a huge wave with this languishing column you wrote for the New York Times. For the two people out there who didn't read it, first of all, to those two people, you should read it because it's truly excellent.

It was very meaningful to me personally. But let's just start with a definition. What do you mean by languishing? So, the original term comes from a sociologist, Cory Kees, who noticed that we have this spectrum of well-being, that on one end you have depression and anxiety, on the other you have flourishing or thriving. And we don't talk a lot about what's in the middle. And he called it languishing. He defined it as a sense of emptiness and stagnation. And to me languishing feels like you're looking at life through a foggy windshield,

which is what a lot of people were describing as a pandemic fog, literally. Do you think, since we are sensibly going to be talking about work, a lot about work, do you think this sense of languishing is connected to our work lives? I think it's often caused by our work lives and how badly they suck. So if you look at the data,

I've seen a couple of national polls over the past few months that have included languishing now. And it turns out that more people are languishing at work that even then are burned out. So when you're burned out, you're emotionally exhausted, you're drained of the point that you feel like I have nothing left to give to my job.

When you're languishing, you still have some energy, but you just feel kind of blah or me. And the data from Keyes and his colleagues are pretty clear that when people are languishing on their jobs, they have trouble concentrating, they struggle to stay motivated, they end up cutting back on work,

and they just kind of feel stuck. And I mean, how many people work in dead-end jobs that left them feeling that way even before COVID? And then you add in COVID to the mix, I literally can't leave my chair anywhere to go. And I just feel like I'm in a world that has no momentum whatsoever in it. But now that we are in fits and starts moving back toward,

I don't want to use the word normal, is very problematic, but moving back toward something that is a rough facsimile of pre-COVID in some areas, do you think languishing is being meaningfully addressed or no? I worry that it's not being addressed enough. I think some of that comes from with it, right? So one of the things that struck me about languishing

is we often don't even notice that we're doing it. You know, in my case, right, last year, it probably started the first summer. So summer 2020 into the pandemic. I found myself staying up late playing online scrabble on my phone and binging entire seasons of Netflix shows and then wondering, wait, have I seen this before?

I'm not even sure. And I couldn't explain my behavior at first, which really annoys me as a psychologist to study his motivation. I'm supposed to be able to make sense of my own actions. And I think it didn't hit me because there was no depression immediately grabbing my attention. There was no burnout, leaving me to say, you know, I just can't function. And so I went for a few weeks like this before I realized, oh, I'm sort of stuck in this zone of not really feeling productive or motivated or actually having clear goals or,

I'm not even finding as much joy in the things that I love to do as I used to be. But I think if we don't notice it, we don't act on it, right, we don't do anything to change it. And so it's pretty easy to keep muddling through your routine and continue languishing even as the world around you opens up. I also worry that we're not doing enough

to rethink the cultures and structures of work that are causing people to languish. And we can talk about what those are, but I'm watching so many employers right now, Dan, that are basically dragging people back to the office and saying, all right, we're just gonna return to business as usual, forgetting that things are very much still not normal, and that taking somebody who's struggling

and putting them in a broken culture is not gonna heal them. I wanna talk about that, but let me just stay with languishing and in particular with you, are you languishing now? Well, I don't know, you tell me, do I seem just stay with languishing in in in particular with you. Are you languishing now? Well, I don't know. You tell me do I seem like I'm languishing. You didn't shave today. I don't know if that's a sign of anything. I only do it once a week. So okay. Hopefully that's a pre pandemic pattern that's persisted out of a desire to save time. No, I don't feel like I'm languishing. I think I think it depends on whether you're asking about

languishing as kind of an ongoing condition or a temporary emotion, right? So I have moments where I feel like I'm languishing. And in fact, I think every writer languishes, right? When you're trying to figure out, okay, how do I write the intro chapter? You know, and you stare at that blinking cursor on your screen and you're like,

why is it called a cursors? Is it because of all the writers who cursed it? Those are moments of languishing and we all have them, but I think that's a normal part of the human experience. I don't feel like I'm chronically languishing at all. I feel like I'm much more fired up than I was during those days when I was kind of languishing repeatedly. So I think it passed the worst of it. I don't know of this qualifies, but for me, I noticed the time of day when I feel the languishing the most is it around 8 or 8 30 at night. This is if we don't have plans, my wife and I, because anytime we do something social, I feel the opposite of languishing.

I really love seeing other people. But just say it's just a regular night, we don't have anything planned, and I plop down for the thing that I've been looking for to all day, which is doing nothing and watching a little bit of TV, and I can't find anything to watch. And this giant bursting world of content, nothing seems good to me.

And that's when I start to feel, oh yeah, it's not that there's nothing good, but like I can't get myself excited, I can't get myself interested, something's flat and stale here. Does that resonate with you at all? Yeah, I mean, that sounds very similar

to how many people experience languageing. It's interesting, because you're breaking one of my rules, which is, I don't turn on the TV unless I already know what I want to watch. Oh. And that way, I don't end up wasting all this time, channel surfing. Oh, that's good.

But maybe there's a discovery limit there, too. I just assume if something's good, I'll hear about it. So I'm looking forward to watching it during the day. Okay, if I finish my work in time, when our kids are asleep, then I'll give myself the permission to do that. And then it actually becomes something to be excited about. So I wonder if there's a small shift in that routine to break the languishing pattern.

So what do you do when the kids are asleep and you're done with your work and you don't know of a thing you want to watch? What's your move then? Typically I'll read, I think, sometimes I'll say, all right, let me give myself, you know, 10 or 15 minutes for a game like online scrabble, but I have to set a boundary on it.

Otherwise, I'll just keep playing. One of the things you mentioned in your article is that sometimes people are doing this like kind of, I don't know what the, you used a great term that's eluding me now, this sort of revenge procrastination or something like that. You're staying up late and deliberately doing something quote unquote useless.

Yeah, I don't know who they're taking revenge on, but it's like some feeling of agency. Yeah, I don't know who they're taking revenge on, but it's like some feeling of agency. Yeah, I think it was the journalist, Daphne Kaylee, who coined the term revenge bedtime procrastination, which I thought was so clever, because I always thought of myself as somebody who doesn't procrastinate.

I dive into projects right away. I'm excited to do things. I've even been described as a procrastinator because I like to launch in way ahead of schedule. And when I heard this term all of a sudden, I realized, wait a minute. I have been procrastinating on bedtime. Like I just, you know, staying up past midnight

when I always like to be asleep by 10. What am I doing? And I think in Daphne's writing, it was an attempt to reclaim some freedom that you lost during the day. So, you know, you have an overly structured work day, there's somebody micromanaging you or controlling your time.

And so, you say, well, I'm gonna squeeze out an extra two hours to do whatever I want. Only the irony is you're not doing really anything that you want. And you're then exhausted the next morning and you probably experienced less joy as a result. I think my version of this was a little different. It was, I thought myself staying up because I wasn't aware of it, but I was looking for some of that sort of progress and joy that I was missing

during the day, right? So I feel like I'm kind of languishing a little bit and then at night, I'm like, okay, like the rush of a seven letter word and that breaks the kind of languishing a little bit, and then at night, I'm like, okay, the rush of a seven letter word, and that breaks the cycle of languishing. But then I'm exhausted the next morning, and I'm languishing all over again, right? So it becomes this very vicious cycle. So how do we self-diagnose with languishing, and when or if we get there, what do we do about it?

I think the best data I've seen on the diagnosis part is, look, it's not a psychiatric condition, right? It's just an emotional state. And in the key's data, he basically says, the reason it's hard to recognize is that it's not the presence of mental illness. It's just the absence of peak mental health. So, his indicators are really about asking,

what is your overall level of well-being? I guess you could also go to the, I always think of the Harvey Danger song, I'm not sick, but I'm not well. And I think that's probably a symbol of languishing for a lot of people. I think that what do you do is a little bit clearer when you recognize it. So I did his head talk over the summer on how to stop languishing and start finding flow. And I felt like a crystalized something that I had alluded to in the article, but didn't quite put my finger on, which is, I think in general, the opposite of languishing is flow. It's getting into that zone of complete immersion or absorption and activity. And the reason that we stop languishing when we find flow is we actually lose sense.

We lose track of our own feelings, our own anxieties, our own distractions. We're completely merged with whatever we're doing, whether it's, you know, like the time I read the, the first three Harry Potter novels in a weekend and then was genuinely upset to remember that Hogwarts wasn't real. Devastating. I was so mad, like I got completely into the books and I was like, okay, platform nine and three quarters. I will be there one day. Then a jolt of reality.

Was the jolt of reality delivered by an owl? I would have liked it better if it happened. It was me realizing that there wasn't a fourth book yet and all of a sudden that fictional world had betrayed me and left me behind. But I think that when you get into one of those zones of flow, I guess it's similar to the mindful state that meditation puts you in,

which is you're not conscious of your own thoughts. Necessarily, you're completely immersed in the moment. And I think that that's the first benefit of being in flow is that it forces mindfulness, right? It puts you out of all of your anxieties about the future and your ruminations about the past and it allows you to get totally absorbed in the present moment.

So I think that seems to be a first step, but it's not enough, right? It's not enough just to be mindful because what you're paying attention to may well be sort of the fact that you're languishing. I think the second piece is a sense of mastery, which is you need a feeling of progress, and it doesn't have to be a huge triumph,

it can actually be a small win. I think it's why so many people celebrated baking a loaf of sourdough during the early days of the pandemic. I'm like, yes, I have accomplished something. And that creates the sense of the kind of forward movement that staves off the languishing feeling. And I think for a lot of people, it stops there.

Like, okay, I'm mindfully focused on a project. And I feel like I'm making headway in it. But I think the peak moments of flow have another element attached to them, which is they make you feel like you matter to other people that you make a difference. And I think, strangely enough, one of the things I talked about in the TED Talk was

that my answer to it's a languishing during the pandemic was playing Mario Kart. Never would have guessed it. I'm driving a cartoon car around. Why in the world is that gonna make a difference? But it required complete mindfulness. You can't take your eyes off the screen for even a split second. Otherwise, you spin out and lose. It gave me a sense of mastery. I love the moments of

being able to aim, you know, a green shell at members of my extended family and say, all right, if I get this right, I'm going to hit them. And I feel like I've, you know, I've really achieved some confidence in that. And it mattered. You know, my extended family was halfway across the country. We couldn't see each other face to face, but we could play online in Nintendo Switch. And it gave my kids something to look forward to.

You know, I think in some ways my sister was expecting twins. I couldn't show up to support her in any way, but we were able to relive one of our favorite childhood memories and play Mario Kart together. I felt like I had something to contribute in those moments. And what was so strange to me, Dan, was that after a couple weeks of playing these regular online Mario Kart games, the feelings of languishing subsided. It's great, but I love that example because it's not grandiose. It's not even particularly like laudable, but you didn't go volunteer at a soup kitchen, you know, we're, wait, are you degrading my Mario Kart? No, are you saying it's not a noble task? I'm uplifting it by praising how

down to earth and relatable it is as opposed to making me feel bad about myself for something I may or may not ever do. Yeah, you're right. There's no moral superiority in playing an Nintendo game to escape languishing. I will say I've gotten some hilarious emails from people saying, can you give me some recommendations for how to master Mario Kart? I think you missed the point. The point is not that we should all go play Mario Kart

to stop languishing, right? It's to ask, what is my version of Mario Kart? What is the activity that gives me a sense of mindfulness and mastery and mattering? And how do I make sure that that ends up on my daily calendar? And I think this was the other thing that really changed for me during the pandemic was,

I think for the last 20 years, I have treated that kind of play as a reward for finishing my To Do List. I'm like, I've got a bunch of tasks to accomplish today. And if I hit them in time, then I'll do something fun at night. And I think what I realized through languishing was that those moments of joy and play and fun,

they actually belong on my to-do list, right? Their source is a fuel, and they actually prevent languishing, which makes them productive, even though they don't sound like they're achieving anything. I think it's such an important point, for people who want to hear more about that, there are a couple of people who've been on the show before. We'll put a link to the in the show notes, but Catherine Price has talked about this and also Alex Sujoon Kim Pang, who wrote a book called Rest talks about this and it's just you can't hear it enough. Wait, Dan,

can I ask you a question on that? Yes, yes. This might just be my DNA or capitalism or some combination of the two, but I'm kind of allergic to the idea of rest. When I hear rest, I think first of all of sleep, which I hate, I need it, but I wish I didn't because it's a colossal waste of hours in the day.

I wish I could hire somebody to sleep and I get the emotional credit for it. To ask for a bit, yeah. Yeah, I mean, seriously, I know people who love sleep. I'm like, I don't get it. I can't imagine something I would be less excited to do eight hours a day, but my body requires it, right? So I'm stuck with it. So I think of that.

But I also think of kind of lounging around, right? And my idea of rest is much more active. I guess it's relaxing in some ways, but it still might involve real energy, right? Like I rest by reading, which is not, I don't know, it's not totally passive, or I rest by playing a cognitively demanding game, or sometimes even by working out. And I wonder if the framing of these activities

as resting as opposed to energizing leads us to think about them too narrowly. Right? Even like I wouldn't have called Mario Kart rest. Right? It's fun. But it has the same function for me as sitting in bad watching TV. Maybe even more so because it's more active. Yes. I think that is exactly what Alex Pang is saying.

He's talking about active rest and he's calling that the flip side of work. They're not at odds. You need one for the other and he's talking about long walks. Yep. He's talking about exercise, woodworking, cognitively demanding hobbies and games, often done with other people, very much an overlap with Catherine Price, right? Who's got a book called The Power of Fun that's coming out.

I think it's a really interesting, I don't want to say antidote necessarily to capitalism, but like a value add to capitalism because at the end of the day, I am so steeped in capitalism that I do want to get stuff done, right? And I love the idea that the rest of the play helps me get stuff done. And also it's good for me. Yeah. Same. And I'm much more excited about making time for it. If I call it play or fun than if I call it rest. Yes. No, fair enough. So maybe your quibble with Alex would be a branding one rather than a substantive one. I'll tell you the one thing that's really helped me with languishing is, and I don't

know if it hits all three of your M's, mindfulness, mastery, and mattering. It does kind of, but with a little bit of an asterisk. So a few months ago, I got a drum set. I've been playing drum sets as 10, so I loved play drums. And I want my six year old son to, he wanted to learn. So, and now we live in a house as opposed to an apartment, so everything was coming together. So we went and got a drum set, and it is wonderful, because even in the middle of the work day, I'll get up and play for a little

bit. It is so much fun. It's a great energy release. I've got the mindfulness. Everything's gone away. Although we could quibble on the use of the word mindfulness in this. We could get technical about it, but we won't. I've got the mastery because I can feel myself getting better at it.

It's the mattering where I have a little bit of a question because I have so much fun when I'm playing by myself. I enjoy teaching my son, but it's not nearly as much fun watching him do it, that it is for me to do it. So, thoughts on that? Well, it sounds like it's a lot harder to get into flow when teaching a six-year-old

to drums than when playing drums. I think it sounds like what you're waiting for is when he gets to the point that he's good enough that he can play with you. Yes. And then you get close to flow. Yes. And then it's really an activity where you matter because you're creating a shared experience and probably some really meaningful childhood memories too. Yes.

It's so cute though watching him. He's learning to play like... He won't look at the drums because he's just looking at me the whole time for approval, which is, you know, not the right way to play the drums, but it's pleasing from my parental narcissism. So this means you felt like you were also languishing at some points in the pandemic. We did for sure, for sure, especially during the times

when we couldn't have social interaction. I have a think a mix of extroversion and interversion, but I really do love seeing people. And even last night, just literally last night, and my wife and I had dinner with a mix of extraversion and interversion, but I really do love seeing people. And even last night, just literally last night and my wife and I had dinner with a bunch of my former colleagues from ABC News, who I really love. And we were in such a good mood when we got in the car afterwards. And it's just very invigorating for me to be around other people.

And when that was taken away, I did suffer. And obviously that's not unusual. But even now, I can feel temporary states of languishing in day parts. I mean, I work incredibly hard all day. As you know, writing a book, it can sap you. And so by the time eight o'clock rolls around and we've put Alexander to bed and I'm looking forward to this TV time or whatever. And some part of me is unwilling to commit to anything

because I'm just, everything seems flat. That can be a tough time of day. Yeah, you know, you just touched on a couple of things that I think are worth to get into a little bit. One is, I was really surprised by the evidence on who struggled the most during the pandemic. I know of at least three papers now that have shown that introverts were actually

experiencing more stress and more mental health problems than extroverts during lockdown. Like we all saw the social media posts, right? We're like lockdowns announced and introverts say, I've been preparing my whole life for this moment. Right? And I think the mistake they made obviously was really confusing

introversion with a preference for solitude. Right. You know, I think so many people were told at some point that extraversion is where you get your energy. And it, apparently, it's not. We're all energized by social interaction. I'm an introvert. And I even get energy from talking to other people. The difference is that I'm more easily over simulated. But because of that, I didn't seek out as much social interaction during the pandemic, and then that can create a sense of self-isolation and loneliness. Whereas, as somebody who's a little bit more extroverted, you're definitely more extroverted than I am, Dan. You probably much more quickly said, all right, I think I still have to find

ways to interact with people. Yes, I was really lucky during the pandemic, because at that time, I was still working for ABC News, and every Saturday and Sunday morning, I was really lucky during the pandemic because at that time I was still working for ABC News and every Saturday and Sunday morning I would go in and anchor Good Morning America. And I was super, super blessed to have, it's not my favorite word, but whatever I had, incredible colleagues who I was and am genuinely close friends with. And so that man, I had a party Saturday and Sunday mornings. The problem was I had to get up in 3.45 AM to go to this party and that was a tax that my 50 year old body could no longer abide.

But that really prevented what would have been, I think, a quite a deep slide. Yeah, I can see that. When you were talking about languishing, I was thinking about the Corey Keyes finding that if you wanna predict who's gonna be depressed or anxious over the next decade, it wasn't actually the people who are most depressed or anxious right now.

It was the people who are languishing now. And my interpretation of that is that depression and anxiety lead people to seek help or at least do something to help themselves, whereas that languishing lurks below the surface and then, you know, it's sort of, you're indifferent to it until it's a little bit too late. And I wondered as somebody who's been very public about your struggles with anxiety over the years, if you'd experienced that, if you think about some of your panic attacks or some of your biggest challenges emotionally, were they preceded by bouts of languishing? Or did you even see a version of that play out during the toughest days of COVID? Or did you even see a version of that play out during the toughest days of COVID? If I think back to my infamous panic attack in 2004, it was preceded by a period of,

I've been calling it depression, but you might call it languishing, which was that I had spent a lot of time in war zones as a eager young correspondent came home. And even though I had a very exciting life as a TV reporter and anchor, it was nothing compared to being shot at all day. And I just was bored. I was in withdrawal from the adrenaline. And I think that accelerated to a point of depression, which accelerated to self-medication, which accelerated to a panic attack, which now has millions of views on YouTube. Exactly as you hoped. That's rich, right there, Dan?

That's rich. I don't know. Maybe not the impact you were going for at this time. Perfect. But it did turn into quite a positive one. If you're subsequent work, is any guide? There's an interesting tension here between, on the one hand, I had a conversation with Danny Coniman

a few months ago about his critique of the positive psychology movement. And Danny said, look, it's more important to reduce misery than to promote happiness. Full stop. And I thought, okay, yeah, if I could do one or the other, I would much rather try to figure out how to cure depression or ease anxiety then to boost people's happiness levels. On the other hand, this conversation is making me wonder if that orientation saying that eliminating emotional ills

is more important than creating emotional highs if that leaves us to neglect languishing. To say, all right, once you're not experiencing mental illness, we're just gonna ignore you all together. Mm. I just wonder if it's a false dichotomy. It might be. All right, once you're not experiencing mental illness, we're just gonna ignore you all together. Hmm. I just wonder if it's a false dichotomy. It might be. I mean, isn't one way to address misery

to boost the positive, to teach people the mind is trainable, you can train positive emotions that can be an antidote to depression and anxiety. I think that's right. I think what Danny was going with it was, who do we focus our professional experts, Ethan? Do we focus on people who are in the middle of the spectrum or do we focus on people who are really hurting psychologically?

And he said, we have a responsibility to start with that latter group, the same way that you would hope that in the emergency room, the person with the most of your crisis gets treated first. And I think that's right, but I think you're onto something there. And you know, certainly we have now what two decades of data suggesting that teaching people of the principles of positive psychology can actually help with mental illness. Yeah, so I get his triage argument.

And I think what I would say without much expertise would be, so this is like basically asking advice from somebody who's only qualification, as I slept at a holiday in last night, but here we go, which is that I think that what the science is showing us is that you can treat people, as you just said, who are in the most acute pain with positive psychology, with contemplative tools from the meditation traditions, from the wisdom traditions that can help them not be so owned by their thoughts and emotions, train up counter-vailing forces in the mind,

such as gratitude and the capacity to save or joy, compassion, which is so enobling and empowering in the face of the kind of powerlessness of depression and loneliness. And that can trickle down to the rest of us who aren't sick, but aren't well per Harvey Danger and with the deep 90s cut that you referenced a while ago. And I would also argue that many of these people in the middle are future occupants of the extreme end of depression, anxiety that Danny's, you know, quite rightly wanting to focus on. And so preventing them from entering that category seems important, too.

So it's not comfortable for me to argue by proxy with a Nobel laureate or whatever Danny Kahneman is, but to here we go. Now, I agree with your analysis. I was starting to wonder about is prevention in this case not only the best cure, but also the most widely relevant cure, just given the sheer numbers of people who seem to be languishing. Depending on how you measure it and score it, I've seen the estimates in the US over the past few months anywhere between 30 and 50% of people feeling like they're languishing. That's a lot of people who are potentially on the precipice of some more serious challenges. So, if you're languishing right now, you talked about the flow as a possible antidote.

In particular at work, which is the source of many of our feelings of languishing, I've always found the notion of getting into a flow state, very frustrating, because yeah, the one activity I can think of where I can reach flow or something approximating it is, playing the drums, but writing for me, which is most of my job, I'm never in flow. I'm in constant state of misery, and 1% of what I do works and ends up in the book, and the rest of it is junk. So I've never felt able to get into a flow state while working.

Are you serious? Yes. Well, you're either doing the wrong job or you're doing it the wrong way then. Probably both. Writing is some of my best flow. How do you write? What do you do?

It's miserable. I suffer. Well, I write. I mean, I'm getting better at not suffering. I'm being a little hyperbolic here, just because, you know, a showman. But in the course of writing this book, I've learned a lot of techniques for self-suiting that as my teacher, Joseph Goldstein, has said, the good stuff doesn't come from the stress.

The good stuff comes from when you're relaxed and feeling creative and open. And I noticed that to be true. But it's very easy for me to fall back into frustration over being unable to crack sentence or being able to express an idea or to understand the structure of the book or to worry about people are going to think I'm a incurable douchebag when they read this because it's full of embarrassing stuff. And so I can get tangled very easily. Yeah. So it sounds like one of the reasons

you don't get into flow while you're writing is that you're too self-critical during the process. Yes. Yes. Yeah, I mean, it's one of the reasons I remember Vonnegut writing about basher's and swoopers. You know, one group basically saying, I'll edit as I write, the other saying,

I'm gonna draft and I'm not gonna think about any of it and then I'll treat editing as a separate part of the process. And I've always found the latter more helpful for getting into flow. I think as you were describing it, right? The mental state required to be creative is very different than the one that's required to refine and evaluate ideas, right?

So I wanna be as open and non-judgmental as possible while I'm generating content, and then separately a couple of weeks later I'll read it and write like, who wrote this garbage? I hope it wasn't me to try to figure out what's worth salvaging and developing further. And that seems to be helpful for flow. I think the other thing I'd wonder about, which this speaks to, is just clearing out distractions. I was stunned to read that the average person was checking email 74 times a day,

that they were usually switching tasks every 10 minutes. And even if you're lucky enough to get into a flow state in that tiny window, you're not going to stay in one for very long. If you're constantly shifting your attention away from the task. And so I think that computers are designed for parallel processing, right?

Humans are serial processors. We can really only do one thing at a time. That's very useful. So whether you're writing or not, whatever your job is, data entry, reading x-rays and figuring out what's wrong with people, customer service, drawing up marketing plans, managing people, whatever it is, if you are task switching too much, you are reducing the odds of getting into this flow state, which again can prevent languishing. Yeah, you're also hurting your performance on both tasks.

There's this research by Sophie Luroy that I love on what she calls attention residue, where she shows that if you leave task A unfinished unfinished, that your performance on Tascay be suffers because you have a little bit of mental attention still dedicated to figuring out, even if it's in your subconscious, how you're gonna work out the rest of Tascay? Yes, that makes a lot of sense. And that feels like,

I'm just interpolating back to so many of my work days and saying, yeah, that's what was happening. Yeah, but it does raise a little bit of a paradox, which is I've also benefited tremendously from the Hemingway technique of leaving a sentence unfinished so that when you come back to it, it reduces getting into time. And you can pick up where you left off,

unless you completely forget where you were going, in which case you just shot yourself in the foot. But there may be a workaround, which is there's some brand new research by Jessica Rodel and her colleagues, which looked at one of the reasons why so many people have such a hard time getting engaged when they start their workday,

let alone finding flow, right? Just even focusing on your first task is they're distracted by whatever else it was on their minds. And she and her colleagues design these very, very simple interventions that you could do yourself. There were two different versions of this intervention, and you could decide if you like one or both, but they were both effective.

The first version was basically making a list of the things that you needed to deal with at home, and then committing to come back to them once you were done working. So basically detaching from your home worries. The other was the opposite, making a list of your big priorities at work and literally just out loud giving yourself permission to focus on those for your work day. And both of those interventions accelerated how quickly people got engaged, which ultimately was good for their ability to find flow and be productive and then come back to their outside concerns. And I thought that was a great example of some hard evidence for a pretty simple and actionable practice.

So instead of having this sort of nebulous background static of worry about things you feel you need to do, making the list, concretizes it, externalizes it, and then makes it more manageable. Exactly. That's what I meant to say. That's what I meant to say. You said earlier that one of the big contributors to languishing, if I heard you correctly, what you were saying was one of the big contributors is the structure of the modern workplace. In particular, some mistakes you alluded to, employers making right now as we kind of herky, jerky pull out of the pandemic. So can you hold forth on that? kind of herky, jerky pull out of the pandemic. So can you hold forth on that? I can try.

So I think one of the biggest reasons that people languish is they don't have enough freedom and control over their time. So you look at, I mean, you look at during the pandemic, the number of meetings went up, the number of emails went up, the work day stretched out longer. So the average person is, you person is starting earlier and finishing later and it's two to three extra hours

online. And yeah, maybe you got a little bit more family time during that period if you were at home, but you were also getting interrupted a lot during that time. And so the net of that is that you're not able to concentrate on those moments of deep work, you're not able to take charge over your day. You can't even really prioritize what's important to you. And so you end up with a whole day of a feeling like, I did a lot and I accomplished essentially nothing.

There were a lot of demands at my time, but there's not a lot to show for it. Mm-hmm. So what do we do about that? Because I can imagine what you might be able to do about that as a manager, but I suspect many of the people listening to this show are managed and don't feel like they have the power to make structural changes within the workplace.

So what do we do? Well, it's always easier to drive change if you have a coalition behind you, right? So if you're asking for yourself, it becomes a request that has to be justified. If you can make a case that a whole group of people are gonna benefit from it, your entire team, then it's something to consider.

So I would start by thinking about why some extra freedom or flexibility is in the organization's interest. You could think about making a case for quality. You could highlight how many people are burning out. Personally, what I would bring to the table in many workplaces right now is the great resignation. That literally millions of people are quitting their jobs right now. And the people who quit first are usually the most talented because they have the most options. So, I obviously want to do everything in my power to keep all the superstars that we have here around.

I'm really worried that people are languishing, that they're burned out, that they just feel stressed you thin. And listen, I know, I know that you are skilled at driving change around here. And so, I would love your guidance around how we could, you know, try to shift some of these dynamics. And there's research by Katie Lilly and Quest on this which shows that when you ask for advice, a couple of things happen. One is you flatter the person, right?

We all admire the wisdom of people who come to us for advice. Dad, you're a genius. You have great taste. You need to come to me. And secondly, in order to give advice, that person then has to walk in your shoes and see your perspective. So they're more likely to want to be your advocate instead of your adversary. So I would figure out what is the collective problem for the team or the organization that's

being caused by whatever you've diagnosed, whether it's the languishing or the restriction in freedom. Why is that bad for your manager? And then ask for your manager's recommendations about how to deal with it. And the hope is you either get some good recommendations or you actually have a champion to start working with you toward change. Much more of my conversation with Adam Grant

right after this. Raising kids can be one of the greatest rewards of a parent's life. But come on, someday's parenting is unbearable. I love my kid, but is a new parenting podcast from Wondry that shares a refreshingly honest and insightful take on parenting. Hosted by myself, Megan Galey, Chris Garcia, and Kurt Brownleur, we will be your resident not-so- so expert experts.

Each week we'll share a parenting story that'll have you laughing, nodding, and thinking, oh yeah, I have absolutely been there. We'll talk about what went right and wrong. What would we do differently? And the next time you step on yet another stray Lego in the middle of the night, you'll feel less alone. So if you like to laugh with us

as we talk about the hardest job in the world, listen to, I love my kid, but wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on the Amazon Music or Wondery app. You wrote recently an article for the Wall Street Journal about flexibility. Can you just regurgitate for us what the primary thesis was? So the thesis is that when we look at the great resignation, many people are quitting their jobs supposedly because they don't want to be forced back into the office. And I think that that frames the problem much generally.

I think what happened is people have long been wanting more freedom at work. We have data actually tracing back almost two decades, showing that the preference for flexibility was rising, that people were less willing to sell their souls to their employers. They were more interested in having family time and leisure time outside of work.

And they just didn't necessarily think it was possible until COVID meant that they got a little bit of a taste of what extra freedom looked like, and now they want more of it. So I think the great resignation is not just about wanting to be able to choose where you work. It's also a quest for freedom around when you work, how much you work, who you have to

work with, what you get to work on. So instead of just debating, what's going to be the place where we work, what we should be talking about is how do we give people more autonomy, more choices around the people they work with, the processes that they use, the purpose that they worked toward, and especially the priorities that they get to set. What do you think this is all going? I'm asking this in part because I was very interested in this article that I suspect you probably read from the New York Times column this far,

Hod Manju about a concept called anti-work. There is apparently a very popular thread on Reddit called, I think it's like backslash anti-work. And there's this growing questioning of work and not only of the structures of the modern workplace but of the fact that we in the West so often measure ourselves by what we do. I hope we rethink that, right? I'm an organizational psychologist.

I study work for a living, but I don't think it should define us. And I think it does in America probably more than any other country on Earth, right? We ask our children, what do you want to be when you grow up? And the only acceptable answer to that is a career. As if all you are is the job that you do.

When we meet somebody at a cocktail party, when we go to cocktail parties, you go apparently go to parties, I don't. But if I did, right, the first question I would ask someone is, what do you do? What do you do, yeah? Which is then treating your job as a representation of your identity, of your status in the world.

And I think that there's been a bit of a great reckoning on that, with a growing number of people in the West saying, why do we work so much? As a society, we don't have to. You know, I'm really struck by the anthropologist, James Sussman's analysis that for most of human history, people worked 15 hour weeks, and that industrialization has not brought us all of the, it's certainly brought

us a lot of economic growth, but it hasn't necessarily improved our quality of life in all the ways that we expected it to. I'm not suggesting that we return to hunter-gatherer life, right? But I do think that, you know, that things are a little bit out of balance and that for multiple generations, we've allowed work to dictate our lives. Work is determined, certainly it's determined in the city we live in.

It's determined how much time we get with our kids at home. It's set even just how much rest or player are we allowed to do. And I think that, society, we have this backward, right? I think the big cultural question is, how do we design work to fit into our life priorities as opposed to squeezing our life priorities around or into the gaps in work?

And I don't know where that's going, but I think it's a conversation that's long overdue. Yeah, I mean, you just said you don't know where it's going and I don't think anybody really does, but I have some skepticism about, I mean, this is so deeply ingrained in us, this sort of capitalistic, individualistic, materialistic, set of impulses.

I can see maybe some people go to a four day work week. We've been kind of nudging in that direction at 10% half here. And I know there's data to suggest that actually productivity goes up with a four day work week, but are we gonna end up in a world where people no longer define themselves by their jobs?

I don't know. Maybe that's a high bar. You know, I think Freud was wrong about almost everything. But one of the things that he might have gotten right was when he wrote that the two greatest joys in life are to love and to work. And I don't think he meant to work in the capitalist sense, right? He meant it in the sense of, I have a project that matters to me, and it allows me to contribute

something to others. I think that there's nothing wrong with that being part of our identities. I just don't want it to swallow up our identities and leave nothing left. But I think the four-day work week experiments are really interesting. I think employers ought to be a lot more creative and say, well, why don't we test a four-day work week against a six-hour work day? There are some jobs and some cultures that are going to be much more conducive. If you think about high-attentional demand jobs. Jobs that require extreme concentration. I don't necessarily want people doing 4, 10-hour days

if they're an air traffic controller, for example. I think a five-day, six-hour work week is probably going to be much safer. I think the opposite might be true for jobs that are, let's say, more service-oriented. I don't think we've even scratched the surface of running enough of those experiments to have a clue what's going to work in a given type of job or in a given type of organization

let alone industries and countries. But I think those are the kinds of experiments that we need to be running. I mean, it's hilarious to me, Dan, that even Henry Ford believed that when people worked less, they produced more. He ran experiments in his factories, found that when you cut people's hours back from, I think 60 toward 40, that they actually got more productive. Who knew, right? And if Henry Ford believed that, you don't have to be that humane in order to envision a better world of work that actually serves the quality of life.

And I think it's amazing how many leaders and managers, despite the rigorous evidence that exists now, still have this knee-jerk reaction of, but I had to walk six miles in the snow, barefoot uphill. Both ways. Yeah, exactly. So therefore, I'm gonna treat my company like our fraternity, and I'm gonna haze all of you new

comers. Why? It's not necessary. I've seen that strain of thought in my own mind to the detriment. Yeah, to the yes, it's silly. And to my own detriment to the detriment of people around me.

So yes, I want to talk about team work because I think team work is some of the most meaningful and most difficult part of modern work. And you've written and talked about this a lot. And one of the things you say in your Wall Street Journal article is, and I'm quoting here, that it's not the frequency of interaction that fuels productivity and creativity.

It's the intensity of interactions. So what do you mean by that? Well, this is research done by Chris Afrietyl and Anita Wolley, who studied virtual software teams over a three-month period. And they tracked their interaction patterns and found that the most productive and most creative teams were not in touch every hour, not even every day.

They would go off and schedule a whole morning or maybe even a two or three day window for deep work. And then they would come together and do these blitzes where they'd have messages and bits of code flying back and forth. And the pattern has been called burstiness, which I think is a great term. I think a burstiness is the sense that your collaboration is literally bursting with energy and ideas. And I thought that the reason that that was productive

and creative is you can build on each other. But the data told a slightly different story, which is when you have these intense interactions with lots of communication in a short period of time, that's actually just motivating, right? It's energizing to know that other people are there in real time ready to respond to you. As opposed to I send something out into the ether and I don't know if somebody is going to respond now, tomorrow or next year. And I think what that research made really clear is we need intermittent collaboration.

We need to give people independent time to do their own work. We need separate time set aside for us to collaborate. And I think the collaboration overload that many people have been experiencing has been to the detriment of what organizations are trying to accomplish. It's so interesting that we need collaboration, but it needs to be in the right dosage and with the right boundaries. That sounds exactly right. And it gets me to, I think you're actually going to settle an argument in my favor about. Well, we can't have that. Can we? Who are you arguing with?

Zoom calls. I have gotten in a lot of trouble in my organization because I hate Zoom calls. I like phone calls, which makes me a dinosaur. Nope, but when I have to stare at a screen, I'm not listening. I now hide self-view so I can't see myself so I'm not obsessed with my hairline or anything like that. But I'm just, I feel watched. I feel like I'm in a panopticon.

I don't like that feeling. I feel stuck at my desk. I can't pace around, which is the way in that I can really start to think. And I have tried to make the case to my colleagues that I will listen to more if I don't need to be on the Zoom call, if I can just take a walk and listen. And I have lost decisively.

I mean, like, decisile, I just went into full capitulation, but it's not, I don't think, to the good. Don't give up, Dan. Don't give up. The data, I think, are very clear and consistent that your colleagues need to think again on this one. So I think the first finding that really caught my eye was a paper by Michael Kraus at Yale,

who did five experiments on how well we read other people's emotions based on what kinds of cues we have access to. And he found that people were more accurate if they closed their eyes or the lights were turned off and they could only hear the other person's voice. That having facial expressions in body language did not add anything to the ability to read emotions

and in some cases it actually detracted and that was true whether they were trying to gauge the emotions of friends or strangers. So what's going on there? Well, I think the first thing that's going on is that tone of voice is a pure signal of emotion. Whereas facial expressions, body language, they can be misleading. We often misinterpret them. I think the second thing that's happening there is what you are touching on, which is when you have extra cues, you're more likely to get distracted. I think the second thing that's happening there is what you are touching on, which is when you have extra cues, you're more likely to get distracted. And when you're just listening to somebody's voice,

you can focus just on what they're saying and how it's coming across as opposed to trying to juggle the cognitive load of, well wait, what does that smile mean right now? Does that mean Dan is excited to see me? Or is he feeling what psychologist called duping delight where he's about to tell me a lie and he's really, really energized

that he's about to get away with it. I don't know. I'm not sure, right? Whereas in your voice, I can probably hear it a little bit more clearly. So I think that sort of exhibit A, right, is you don't need to see people's faces to understand what they're feeling.

You might be better off with the camera off on that. So exhibit B is that one of the easiest ways to fight the fatigue that we're all feeling is to turn off cameras. This is an experiment that Kristen Shockley and her colleagues published this past summer where they showed that if people were randomly assigned to turn their cameras off some weeks,

their emotional exhaustion went down. And that was especially true for women and newcomers who are the people who, I think, unfairly faced extra pressure to worry about their appearance or their image. And taking that off their plate made it easier for them to concentrate. They were more engaged in meetings. So if you want to fight Zoom fatigue, I'm not saying the camera should always be off. If you're giving a presentation or if you have a large group, there's a time and a place where you want to see people's faces, but we do not need them all the time. And in small groups, especially, this is,

I guess, exhibit C, Anita and her colleagues of burstingness showed that if you're in pairs, you actually achieve higher collective intelligence, you're smarter together if you are only audio, if you don't see each other. And we don't know whether some of that is a distraction effect again of looking at each other. What we can say from the data though is that when you are hearing only the voice, you're more likely to pause and let the other person talk, as opposed to dominating the conversation, because you actually have to check in to see if they're still there and with you.

Whereas when you see them, it's a little bit easier to assume that you're on the same age and you're in sync. As a result, there's less even turn-taking and you end up with a less balanced conversation. So I guess if I were to sum up my closing argument, I would say allowing people sometimes to turn their cameras off has three clear benefits. One, emotional accuracy. Two is reducing zoom fatigue. and three is giving everybody a chance

to be included in the conversation. So Dan, what are you going to do now? A victory dance. But let me actually, let me in the spirit of your last book, think again, and the idea of intellectual humility and writing your own biases. Let me make the counterargument. Please do. I'm ready to shoot it down.

Although, I guess that would be me going back into prosecutor mode instead of scientists. Don't! All right, go on. The counterargument is, okay, 10% happier is a pretty new company. We doubled in size from an employee-based perspective in the course of the pandemic. Many of these people have never met each other.

I am one of the co-founders in the face of the company. My mere presence can raise people's blood pressure, not because of anything inherent to me, just because of the nature of power dynamics. And it is beneficial for people in their limited time meeting with me to be able to feel like they are at least in some facsimile of a room with me in a Zoom room to get a little bit more of an animalistic feel of one another. That's interesting. So I know of no evidence to speak to that set of arguments, although there are a couple

of studies waiting to be done there around whether people get more anxious if someone in power has their camera off, for example. And whether it actually does build trust to see somebody in a glitchy zoom feed as opposed to just hearing their voice. I think that's a reasonable case. I'm not sure it shifts my overall thinking, though, which is I'm advocating for a mix of cameras on

and cameras off, depending on who's in the room and the nature of the meeting. And so I think if I were in your shoes, I would come back and say, you're right. My presence is important. I'm literally the face of this company. And whether or not that's good for me, my job as a leader is to serve the interests

of the organization and try to make sure that my team is engaged. And if they want to see me, then I'm willing to be a servant leader and suck it up. But that doesn't mean I need my camera on every minute of every day. So let's talk about which meetings are helpful to have cameras on and where we should all be taking a walk, which also, by the way, is consistent with 10% happier as principles. Yes. And one last thing to say, this doesn't require a response, but just in the name of fairness

to the TPHers who have complained above my Zoom presence, which is that often they'll be in meetings where everybody else is cameras on, and mine is the only one off, and because I'm taking a walk as I've been stuck in front of my computer all day and I need to get out and really think. And just the optics of that, it just doesn't feel right. And that, I think, is really true. Much more of my conversation with Adam Grant right after this.

So I do wanna get to at least one more thing, and it has to do with teamwork, which is this notion of collective effervescence. That's a delightful term. What is that? Yeah, I'd love to say credit for it, but coined by the great sociologist, Emil Dercheim, I think that my favorite terms this year have come from sociologists between that and my enriching.

Dercheim coined it over a century ago, and he was describing the sense of energy that people have when they come together in a group around a shared purpose. So he was thinking about prayer or dance or even showing up at a stadium to watch a soccer game. And I think one of the real casualties of COVID was we lost that feeling of collective effervescence. And it wasn't just because we weren't able to show up in crowds.

If you look at the recent research that's been done, people found collective effort of essence riding on buses, you know, just having casual chitchat with each other. They found it waiting in line at their favorite coffee shop when they had that predictable interaction with the person who knows them as a regular behind the counter. And those moments were all taken away from us. So I think that's the kind of experience that extroverts craved right away. An introvert said, I don't need it, but then we found ourselves missing it.

Is it an antidote to languishing? I think it probably is. I think that collective effort, for Vessence, is it's an experience where you get into group flow as opposed to individual flow. I think that's when people lose their sense of self completely, in many cases, right?

And they're just completely in the moment with the group that they're part of. I think that obviously comes with some mindfulness, depending on the activity, they involve mastery or not. And the mattering is kind of built in, right? Because you have a role to play in this crowd or group. I think one of the things that I find really interesting about this is a lot of people during COVID said, all right, we're not in the same room anymore. Our

collaboration is going to get hurt. Our culture is going to fall apart. So we're going to invest a lot of time in interpersonal trust building and we're going to try to bond. So we'll do virtual happy hours. We'll, you know, We'll do a bunch of early and late team meetings every day so that we can all connect. And I don't have a problem with that other than the fact that sometimes it was just adding more work to people's already overextended calendars. But I think it's in some ways less effective if you look at the data on teams. What matters most in a virtual team is clarity of goals and clarity of roles. Goal clarity is about knowing what are we trying to achieve together?

And role clarity is about feeling like there's a line of sight between what I do and our collective mission. And I think that if managers had spent more time on that, saying, look, this is what we're really all about, and this is each person's individual contribution to that objective,

that people would have found more collective effervescence. They would have languished less. And maybe I don't quite know yet what this is gonna look like, but it makes me wonder, I think part of what people are after in those moments of collective effervescence is a sense of what psychologists would call

optimal distinctiveness, which is probably the last term I will throw out today. Optimal distinctiveness is when you feel like you fit in and stand out at the same time. You belong to the group, but you also have a unique and vital role to play in it. And that's what I think we're wanting to capture. I think that's probably the best collective escape from languishing that I can imagine. I love it. Last question, where did I go wrong? What kind of malpractice did I commit?

What kind of questions should I ask? I have asked, but I didn't. Oh, well, you've actually let me down, Dan Harris, because you have not held me accountable for a commitment I made to try meditating in March, and I haven't done it, and I'm feeling really guilty because it's October. So one thing you can do is you can make sure that I follow up before our next conversation.

I have long resisted the role of meditation and for sure. But I asked you to do it. Okay, you did ask me to do it. I mean, this is a triumphant moment for you. You got me to think again, you accomplished something that none of your peers have ever achieved. And I actually said, I'm willing to try it when this book tour is over. And then I promptly got focused on other things and started talking about languishing a bunch

and it fell off my radar. And seeing you reminded me that I am delinquents. So what can I do that would hold you accountable in the way that would be least annoying and most effective? Find a context where it's not just going to benefit me. So if you could create a version of this experience that then I can share a story with someone else or there's something to be learned from my experience meditating, I'll feel like it's not a selfish act. Well, there's a great podcast called Meditative Story, which I've been on. Oh, you have. Yeah.

Well, but maybe you go back on as somebody telling your story of a long time skeptic and curmudgeon and sticking the mud who actually did it and what happened and what didn't happen. That's pretty interesting. I think I could be talked into that. We'll see if June bites, but that would definitely give me an excuse to do it. June is the producer of that show.

She's very, very smart. I suspect she'll bite. I think that one of the biggest things I've figured out over the past couple of years is, I'm not that motivated to add something to my calendar. If it's just for me, I feel like I already have plenty for me. If it's gonna benefit other people,

then I'll follow through. I mean, the way that would benefit other people is because there are a lot of people who are skeptical about this, unable to get over the hump to do it, both are two separate things that are sometimes comorbid, but either skeptical of it or just can't get over the hump to do it or both, and to hear from somebody who figured out a way through friendly bullying, through finding what it is that actually would motivate you who could talk about how they got over the hump

and what the practice did or did not do for them. I think that would help people. Yeah, even if I don't end up liking it, it might be an interesting reflection. Liking is not the right measure. It's whether it's useful. So you might not like therapy, but if it helps you untangle some of your patterns, it's worth doing. you might not like therapy, but if it helps you untangle some of your

patterns, it's worth doing. You might not like going to the dentist, but it's worth it if you're no longer in, you know, terrible pain, et cetera, et cetera. That is such a western perspective on meditation that it's only useful if it produces some outcome. As opposed to saying, I'm going to do it for the intrinsic experience of the activity. Well, it took me a decade to get to the point where now I do do it just because it's enjoyable. But our conditioning as Western economic units is what it is. And so I don't try to go through the hardest route. I try to go through the easiest route, which is playing into people's desire to be productive, et cetera, et cetera. You are always so sensible and

pragmatic. All right, consider that challenge. We can follow up offline. Final, final question though before we go is, can you just please plug everything you're doing right now so that people go back and read your books or listen to your podcast or read whatever you're putting out on the interwebs. I'm not here to plug my work. I'm here to have an interesting conversation with one of the smartest people I know. Oh, that's very kind, but please plug because that people are going to want to get more. All right, we're just gearing up for a new season of my work life podcast, trying to figure out how to make work not suck. So you can hopefully join us there if you like.

And the two books that I've read of yours, you've written many, but the two books that I've read and really, really benefited from. Think again, which is most recent and is all about the value of second thoughts, intellectual humility, overcoming your biases, and then give and take, which was written many years prior, and I've read several times about the practical,

and I would say self-interested benefits of generosity, which can often be talked about, and sort of, treakly, self-righteous terms, but Adam really puts it into the realm of self-interest, which worked for Western individuals like me. Always a giver. I don't know about that. I'm working my way in that direction.

Always so great to see you. Thank you very much for doing this. Really appreciate it. Same. And congratulations, by the way. I'm earning your freedom. I saw that you retired. I did. I retell well. I mean, this is a bit of a misnomer. I retire from ABC News that I'm still very much employed. Rightfully so. Well, thank you for having me as always. This was fun. still very much employed. Right, Felicia. Well, thank you for having me as always. This was fun. Thanks again to Adam for helping us kick off the work life series here on the show. Before we head out, let me again mention the free work life challenge over on the 10% Happier Podcast, which will teach you how to navigate your life at work without losing your mind. The challenge starts Monday, November 8th on the 10% happier

app, which you can download wherever you get your apps to join right now. This show is made by Samuel Johns, Gabrielle Zuckerman, DJ Cashmere, Justine Davy, Kim Baikama, Maria Wartelle, and Jen Point with audio engineering by Ultraviolet audio. We'll see you all on Wednesday for a brand new episode, part of the Work Life series with Kim Scott, author of a very compelling book called Radical Candor, which she actually followed up with another book called Just Work. Both very interesting books, lots to talk about with her, see all on Wednesday. for See All On Wednesday. Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and ad-free on Amazon Music.

Download the Amazon Music app today. Or you can listen early and ad-free with Wondery Plus in Apple Podcasts. Before you go, do us a solid and tell us all about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondery.com slash survey.