Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 547: Adam Grant on Perfectionism and Procrastination

Episode Date: January 18, 2023

According to guest Adam Grant, excellence does not require perfectionism, and rather than obsessing over the outcome of your work, there are better ways of measuring your own success. Adam Grant is a frequent flier on this show and the #1 New York Times bestselling author of 5 books that have sold millions of copies and have been translated into 35 languages: Think Again, Give and Take, Originals, Option B, and Power Moves. He’s an organizational psychologist who has been the top-rated professor at Wharton for seven years. He’s also the host of a newish podcast, called Re:Thinking with Adam Grant, in addition to his other chart-topping podcast, called WorkLife. In this conversation, we talked about:Adam’s definition of neurotic vs. normal perfectionismWhy he thinks we’re seeing a rise in perfectionism amongst younger peopleStrategies for managing perfectionismA different metric for measuring the quality of our workThe importance of finding the right judges of our workReimagining our relationship to failure by setting a failure budgetThe difference between procrastination vs. what he personally suffers from: “precrastination”Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/adam-grant-547See 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. Hey, everybody. Today we're going to talk about a very common psychic element perfectionism. Sometimes, you hear people talk about perfectionism like it's a good thing, but that may be a bit of a misunderstanding in my view. It's great to have high standards, of course. It's yet another thing to be so obsessive about the outcome of your work that you drive

yourself and everybody around you, totally nuts. Or to be so afraid of failure that you refuse to try anything new at all. In this episode, we're going to get some strategies for managing perfectionism from a very smart and successful person who has struggled mightily with perfectionism himself. Adam Grant is, I'm happy to say, a frequent flyer on this show. He's the number one New York Times bestselling author of five books that have sold millions of copies

and been translated into 35 languages. Those books include, thank again, give and take, originals, option B and power moves. He's an organizational psychologist who has been the top rated professor at Wharton for seven years in a row. He's also the host of a new-ish podcast, which everybody should go check out. It's called Rethinking with Adam Grant. And that's in addition to his other chart-topping podcast called Work Life. In this conversation, we talked about Adam's definition of neurotic versus normal

perfectionism and whether either is a healthy state of being, why he thinks we're seeing a rise in perfectionism amongst younger people, strategies for managing perfectionism, a different metric for measuring the quality of our work, the importance of finding the right judges of our work, and reimagining our relationship to failure by setting a failure budget, that's his term. Then we pivot to a not unrelated issue, procrastination and some strategies for managing that very common, very thorny problem. And within that conversation, Adam holds forth on the difference between procrastination

and what he personally suffers from, which is pre-crastination. Also stay tuned for the end of the interview where Adam asks me to give him a grade on his performance, which then turns into a very interesting personal conversation. The whole thing is great, but in my opinion, that's the best part. We'll get started with Adam Grant right after this. Before we jump into today's show,

many of us wanna 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% calm. 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. I'm a 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 the memes come from. And where's time for my space? Listen to baby. This is Kiki Palmer on Amazon music or wherever you get your podcast. Adam Grant, welcome back to the show. Thanks, Dan Harris. I think it's going to be a treat to

be back here, but I'm also keenly aware of how dangerous it is to predict even the immediate future. I feel pretty confident you're going to be correct in that prediction. Let me also say it's right here at the outset. Congratulations on your new show. Thank you. Thank you. And congratulations on your stellar TED Talk. Oh, I appreciate that. I was basking in the reflected glory of life. And then I think I've only done this to handful of times. I rewatched it when it came online. It was that good. Thank you. I should say because I haven't said this publicly but you know, you are, well, I have called you in public before in a puzzle of generosity. You wrote the great book, Give and Take, and you, behind the scenes with no foreseeable credit, reached out to me when you heard I was giving a TED talk, offered to give me notes.

I rehearsed live in front of you, gave me really good notes that I then integrated into the talk. So thank you for that. You just dramatically overstated my contribution. And I was just trying to pay forward the generosity of people who suffered through many terrible versions of my early TED Talk attempts. So now I was so impressed with the wisdom and the humor and the delivery from someone who claims to be an anxious person.

It was just, it was masterful. Thank you, I appreciate that. All right, well, let's get some wisdom out of you. You had an episode not on your new podcast, but on your pre-existing podcast called Work Life. And you did an episode that I wanted to kind of get you to talk about here because it's such a resonant issue on perfectionism. It was a great episode.

Maybe let's start our conversation by getting you to talk about your own history with perfectionism. Are you trying to make me 10% unhappier right now? I'm always. I always. I mentioned accomplished. Dan, I didn't know I was a perfectionist

until I started diving. Springboard kind, not scuba kind. And I had a huge problem with what's called blocking, where you walked down the board, you jump to the end, and then you're supposed to take off. But I would stop at the end. It's kind of like a baseball pitcher who box, right? They start their motion and then they don't complete it.

And so I would, like, I would walk down the board, I'd leap to the end and then kind of chicken out and I'd back up and start over and I'd do it over and over again. And sometimes I'd waste a good 45 minutes or an hour of practice and we only had one diving board. So my teammates were standing there getting mad at me and my coach who was just infinitely patient

was occasionally a little bit frustrated. And I thought it was because I was afraid. I was afraid of heights. I was afraid of smacking belly flop or blending flat on my back. It hurts. I was afraid of getting lost in mid-air. I had a lot of fear as a diver.

And I had no business diving. I think I made some of those fears. But Eric, my coach, explained to me that my blocking was driven by something else, which was perfectionism. I was like, what are you talking about? I think I was 14 and he said, well, when you don't like your approach, when you're off balance or you feel like you've missed the rhythm of the board, you've concluded it's already too late to do a perfective. So why should I bother trying? I need to start over. And that was a light

ball moment for me. How do you define perfectionism? In psychology, I think we normally define perfectionism as the desire to be flawless, to have zero deficiencies, zero defects, to create an image of being super human. And you've already made a pretty robust nod in this direction, but what are the downsides inclusive of mocking? Well, you waste a lot of time on things that don't matter. I was trying to perfect one dive

and then failing to practice 30 others, right? So I think there's a danger of losing the forest in the trees. There's a lot of evidence that perfectionists are more prone to burn up than the rest of us, as well as depression. And some of that comes from just the obsessive effort to try to prove to a standard that's unattainable. And feeling like your expectations are so unreasonably high,

that no matter how good you get, there's always a gap between where you are and where you want to be. So if you ask a perfectionist, when were you happiest with your performance, usually the answer you get is tomorrow, I hope. Another downside is that it leads to a lack of risk-taking and diminishes creativity. I see this a ton with my students. Every year, I have students who are card-carrying perfectionists. And usually I see it when they not only come in

to class with their resumes showing that they have a 4.0, but they also still put their high school grades on their college resumes. And they have a 4.0, then two. Actually, they usually have a 4.08, or 4.09, because they got A pluses, or they got extra credit, or they had weighted GPAs. And sometimes they will cry if they get an A minus

and feel like they failed in life. And one of the unfortunate consequences of wanting to be perfect is you focus on predictable successes. You do things where you can guarantee that you're going to ace the project or you're going to get 100 on the quiz. That means that you don't stretch out of your comfort zone. You don't take classes that might challenge you where you might got for bid, get an A-

minus. You don't experiment creatively. You basically do the things you've already mastered, and you end up with a narrower and narrower field of competence over time. On the show, you talk about the difference between normal versus neurotic perfectionism. What's the distinction? Normal perfectionism is aiming for extremely high standards of excellence and basically having a positive vision of the future that you're trying to reach for.

Narotic perfectionism is basically fear of failure, kind of walking around believing that everyone is going to find out that you're flawed, that you're defective, and just dealing with tremendous amounts of anxiety around wanting to not fall short of other people's standards, not let other people down. And I think that obviously when we study the two, neurotic perfectionism is even unhealthier than normal perfectionism. Not that normal perfectionism is necessarily healthy.

Is there any evidence that either or both of these flavors of perfectionism is on the rise? Yes, so Tom Kern is a psychologist who spent most of his career studying perfectionism. And what he shows is that since, I think since the late 1980s, there's been a steady increase in perfectionism. You can see this in the US, in the UK, in Canada, and what's powerful

about his analysis is you get surveys of people at the same stage in life. So we look at high school students or college students who are 17 or 20, and then you can compare, okay, what were the high school and college students of the early 90s, like from a perfectionist and standpoint, compared to the high school or college students of today. And there has been a pretty consistent rise over a couple decades. A lot of people blame this on social media, and I think it's likely the case

that social media has contributed to the trend, but it started a generation before social media existed. And in Tom's data, I think there are two factors that we know were at least part of the story. One is extremely harsh parental criticism, and another is strong pressure from parents to succeed. And so, I think we've raised a generation of kids who feel like they can't live up to their parents' ideals, and their parents are brutal when they don't.

What do you think is going on with the parents that they're imposing this pressure that may not have even existed for them? I don't know, you're a parent, Dan. What are you doing to your kids? I was having a conversation with my son this morning who was about to turn eight about drum lessons. Because he was very excited at the beginning of drum lessons.

He's got a drum set in his room. I love playing the drums. But he's he was very excited at the beginning of drum lessons. He's got a drum set in his room. I love playing the drums. And but he's he's now kind of there's a definite like last to that is seeping into his attitude about practicing or going to the lessons. And I'm trying to figure out like, do I? He even says I know if I quit, I'll regret it. So how hard do I push him? Do I let him quit? and then will he regret it?

Yeah, so I wrestle with this all the time. I definitely feel your pain. We've gone through that a bunch of times with our kids. And I think that, so I think you're hitting on one of the, one of the reasons why parents have maybe pushed too hard, which is they're trying to teach grit. They're encouraging their kids to be persistent, to not be quitters, sometimes failing to realize that grit is not about continuing to do something you hate.

It's about committing to a goal, working to try to reach the goal. And then at some point asking yourself, is this goal still achievable? And is it still something that I'm excited to pursue? I think that Angela Duckworth and I have talked a lot about this and one of the things we debated for a long time and ultimately ended up on the same page about after I think a decade of arguments, which were delightful, was that when we think about grit,

we should think about it broadly in terms of goals and values, not narrowly in terms of a task or an activity. So if we take your son down, it would be probably unhealthy to encourage him to be persistent about becoming a great drummer. It would be healthier to encourage him to persist with music and say, okay, if drums isn't your cup of tea, a mixing metaphor is here, but if the drums

aren't your preferred instrument, let's think about this exophone or the violin. Maybe even healthier would be to say, I would love for you to have an artistic or creative outlet for self-expression. And so, you could try another musical instrument, but you could also try performing as a magician. You could also try dancing. You could try art. And you could even broaden that further, right? And ask, okay, I want you to have a chance to excel at something. Maybe at some point we find out that the arts are not what energize you, but maybe we should look into bait.

Maybe we should look at chess, right? And that, I think, is you broaden the spectrum of possible goals beyond just a specific activity. It becomes healthier then to encourage persistence and allow kids to walk away from something that they're maybe not perfect at. What do you make of that? I like it a lot.

I feel a little validated because my wife and I in this conversation with our son this morning said to him, Hey, if drums aren't the thing, we can do piano lessons. And I don't want to pick on this case too much because this issue is universalizable. I mean, the way, Bianca and I are talking to Alexander, this is the way all of us could talk to ourselves on this issue of our levels of persistence that we can say to ourselves, okay, set a goal, go for it, but keep reassessing along the way, is this the right goal?

It doesn't mean you take your foot off the pedal in terms of the amount of energy you're giving to forward momentum. It's about where is the steering wheel pointed. Oh, that's a great metaphor. Yes, I think that's exactly right. Let's talk about perfectionism because you go way beyond bemoaning the problem, you talk a lot about how to manage it. I'm going to tee you up to discuss some of the strategies you have discussed. The first is to recognize that excellence doesn't require perfection. Can you say more about that?

I can try. So I think what probably crystallized this for me was, as a diver. You've seen the Olympics. You probably, I guess, you probably would think of Greg Luganis as an archetype. And the phrase you always hear from announcers is perfect tense. Well, if you spend any time in the diving world, you will know that that is a misnomer. Because if you look at the Olympic judging rule book, a 10 is not for perfection.

It's for excellence. In other words, you can do a flawed dive and still get straight tense. And well, what does that mean? Well, it means that you did a dive so well that we believe it was up to the highest possible standards that humans can achieve. But we know there's still a gap between how good that was and our ideal of what a flawless dive would look like. So you could have jumped higher, you could have spun faster,

you could have folded yourself into a tiny or ball, you could have had a better rip entry where, you know, you made that sound when you hit the water and then it just, it wasn't even a tiny little splash, you just disappeared. You could have pointed your toes a little bit more, right? But the dive was good enough to be considered truly excellent. And you've done it as well as anybody in the world

is capable of doing it. Well, when you understand that, you can apply that to any domain of your life, right? You can say perfection is zero-flossed. Excellence is an extremely high standard. It's attainable for me that either gets me to a level that I could be proud of, or gets me to a level that I know other people would be proud of me, even if I have a hard time being proud of myself. And so you want to calibrate your standard of what

does excellence look like? How good would I have to be in order to be satisfied? I like that a lot, and it doesn't feel when you use words like excellence, it doesn't feel like you're lowering the bar. The second strategy you've talked about is measuring your excellence in terms of your progress. Well, I think this one is something that a lot of people talk about and very few people do. Right.

I think when we think about standards of excellence, we normally compare ourselves to others. And it's often said that comparison is a thief of joy. I think that that seems to be empirically true. But sometimes comparison is real fuel for motivation. We know, for example, that having a role model in your field or in your sport or in your in your chosen career actually leads you to set a higher goal and aim for a more ambitious standard than if you didn't have the role model because it elevates your idea of what's possible. And so I'm not completely

against social comparison, but I think we want to spend more time on self comparison. I think that when we think about measuring progress, as a diver, I never got a tent. I was a serious competitive diver for six years. And I think the highest score I ever got once was an eight and a half. And that's kind of sad, right? Like I poured six years of my life into this activity. And I was a point and a half away from the highest

standard of excellence. Well, what made me satisfied with that was when I started out, I was getting solid fours and four and a halfs on easy dives. And then I was sitting down with Eric and we would, we would set a goal for, okay, can we get this dive to a five, five and a half love? Can we get harder dives? And then can we try to get the fives and five and a halfs on those two? And then can we start to aim for six and six and a half's on your basic voluntary dives? And as you make those comparisons, like I remember finishing a meat about a year in

and feeling kind of bummed that I didn't get any six's. And Eric said, how would you have felt last year if you'd gotten a bunch of fives and five and a half's? I would have thrown a party, Dan. That would have been a new peak for me. And so I think if you compare your current performance to your past self, it's a lot easier to see the progress you've made.

Yes, that's deeply saying advice in my opinion. The third strategy you talk about is to find a group of judges who you trust. Think I miss most about diving. Every single time I got out of the water, I got a score. And life, we don't get that, right? You don't have three people sitting next to you,

watching you do not only performances, but also practices, and saying, hey, I give that one a seven and a half, here are two things you could do to get an eight next time. But we could have those people. I recruited those people, they're now vital to everything I do that I care about. So I guess my judging committee podcast

is a good example of this actually. When I started podcasting what, almost five years ago, we took a draft of an episode, a first draft, and I gave it to a bunch of students, and I said, please rate this on a scale from zero to 10. And nobody gave it a 10. And then my question was, how do I get closer to 10? What are the biggest changes that you think would close the gap there? And what I found really powerful about that is, when somebody gave a 7, I was an aiming for a 10 as a podcaster. I was new to it and I also think podcasting

as a medium that allows us to make a lot of mistakes and that's part of the authenticity of the conversation. And so I had a target in mind, which is I wanted to be in the eight range as a new podcaster. And so if I got a seven from the majority of my students, I would know I could tweak, right? And make relatively incremental changes.

When they gave me a three and a half, like, okay, we need to go back to the drawing board, new topic, new guests, new hosts. Something radical to use to change. And I think having people who can hold up that mirror is invaluable because it allows you to figure out whether you need a radical overhaul or whether you can really move into fine-seuning.

So, Dan, I want to hear about your judging process. How do you gauge the quality of your work? Well, before I answer that question, let me just ask a clarifying question, and I promise this isn't a dodge, I will go back to it. I feel like we do live in a society where we are being judged quite a bit. It's almost like in social media,

it's like we're living in a panopticon where we can never have any privacy. And everything we post, we're constantly fretting about how many likes and comments we get, et cetera, et cetera. So what's the difference between that kind of unhealthy sense of being judged and the healthy, curated, chosen, voluntary judgment that you are voicing upon yourself? Oh, such a good clarification.

Actually, more than a clarification, it's a correction. If I could borrow a line from the philosopher, happy go more, you're right. I was wrong. You're smart. I'm stupid. You're good looking. I am not attractive.

No, dad, I think I should have been really clear. I'm not talking about formal judges, right, who are scoring you. I'm talking about the informal judging I got from my coaches. They were there giving me a score as feedback to help me, not as an attack or a criticism. And I think that's the difference. I think you want to be judged not by critics.

A critic is somebody who, I think this is what drives people mad on social media. A critic is somebody who basically sees your worst self and then evicerates it. A coach is somebody who tries to see you accurately and then help you close the distance between your current self and your best self. And that kind of feedback, it's not discouraging, it's empowering.

Right, I remember, I don't want to overuse diving examples, but the precision is so relevant here. I remember doing one of my favorite dives. It was just a basic front one and a half. You go up, you do a summer salt, and then you dive in. And I had gotten into the point where I consistently got seven, seven and a half, sometimes it's on it. And I did one in practice, and I popped out into the point where I consistently got 7, 7 and a half, sometimes it's on it.

And I did one in practice and I popped out of the water and it felt really good. And Eric just looked at me and he said, Adam, that was bad. I just burst out laughing. It was so bad that he couldn't even bring himself to score it. And I just did almost everything wrong. And it was like three years back in terms of the quality of that dive. And it was, like normally somebody telling you your performance was bad, hurts your ego.

But it was so clear that Eric's sole goal was to help me achieve my goals that he made it really easy to laugh at myself. And I think that that is what your ideal judging committee does, right? Is there there to have your back and help you grow in a way that feels incredibly supportive and developmental? All right, so I let you dodge a bunch. I want to hear about how you do quality control.

Well, just to amplify the point and then answer the question, I think we can curate a group of coaches externally and we can cultivate internally a coach who where we can talk to ourselves to the best of our ability in a way that ups our game rather than degrades our resilience and self-esteem. Having said that, I still struggle with this and I can very much fall back into a sort of math-oriented self-assessment like how many likes did that tweet get, how many views did this video get? That kind of sort of obsessive stock market of me approach really, it's never good.

I can maybe once in a while there's a dopamine hit of something doing well, but there's just, mostly it's a recipe for comparison and suffering. The best self-assessment for me really is in conversation. You know, when I'm talking to the six producers who work on the show about how can we do better when I'm talking to my wife, who's really the most valuable source of input, I feel like in those conversations,

that's when I can get the clearest view on how I'm doing on any given endeavor. Does that make sense? It does, it does. And I think one of the questions that always comes up at this point is, well, how do you make sure that you're receptive to it? Right?

I remember my wife, Alison, at one point, reading a draft, one of my articles, and saying, this is boring. Oh, you know what? I am so lucky to have someone in my life who loves me enough to tell me the truth. Yes, yes. You know, I reread it and I was like,

yeah, this is kind of boring. I need to start over. But, you know, sometimes we all get defensive and we even get defensive. When we know the person loves us and is trying to help us and Sheila Heen in Doug Stone gave me a name for something that I've been doing for a long time but I didn't have a vocabulary for it.

They wrote in, thanks for the feedback about what they called a second score, which is the idea that when somebody gives you feedback or coaching, they've already determined the first score in their head, right? They've already determined that you've got to be minus or a C plus. And you spend all this time trying to fight it, right? And you're kind of grade-grubbing and saying, no, like that article you called boring, it's extremely important. And you didn't get to the engaging part.

And I actually think it deserves an A minus. Well, guess what? There's nothing I can say that's gonna change Allison's view that the article was boring because she's reacting to the article, not in my argument about the article. So what Shilin Doug said is, you should give yourself a second score,

which is how well you took the first score. And basically say, I want to get an A plus for how well I handled the B minus. And I didn't until I read it, I didn't realize, but I've been doing that for a lot of my professional life. And it's just so helpful, right? Because I end up in these situations where I call it, I'll read the criticism from my students out loud in mid course feedback. And I sit there thinking, I don't like these comments. They don't make me feel good.

They call it, in some cases, they lead me to question whether I should be a teacher at all. And then, I think, but I don't want to argue with them because those are their reactions. What I want you know, I think, but I don't want to argue with them because those are their reactions. What I want to do is I want to ace how well I learned from their reactions. And I think that for me is just an invaluable habit to build. I love that. I love that. I had an experience recently. I'm actually four and a half years into writing my next book. And I thought it was was gonna be coming out now, but it won't be coming out for 12 to 18 months

in no small part because I sent a rough draft to a half dozen people a couple of months ago, and the feedback was brutal, really brutal, way more brutal than I thought. These were all coaches, not critics. And I really wanted to show in that process that I could handle it. And now I'd often hang up the phone and have to lie down

because I was just so devastated by the feedback. But I feel like really doing a thing that I wouldn't have been able to name at the time, which is wanting to be an A-plus at receiving the feedback, allowed me to hear way more things than had I been in a debating mode. I'm sorry the feedback was brutal. I'm a little disappointed in you for not sending me the draft, because I've been excited

to read the book, and I think I even offered to read a draft. Like, oh, no, I didn't make Dan's cut. You're going to make the next cut, I promise, because this project is going to require way more coaching as I go. But let me, before I lose the thread here, let me get to the fourth, and then I have some other questions to ask you about potential strategy, but the fourth strategy that you've listed publicly, at least, is don't focus on everything you did wrong.

Again, this is advice for perfectionists. Can you say more about that? Yeah, this is another thing I learned from Eric Best, who I think is the world's greatest diving coach. Eric would, I'd come out of the water, and he'd say, I just want you to focus on one thing to improve. The funny thing about diving is,

an entire dive takes about two seconds. And yet, you can make a list as a, just off that top of your head of 80 or 90 things that had to go well in order to execute the dive. And so you can have a long list of things you wanna fix. And what happens is, you try to fix all of them and you fix none of them, because we can only focus on one thing at a time.

I think that there are computers that are really good at parallel processing, but last time I checked in, humans are serial processors. And so Eric was really good about pushing me and saying, listen, you may be right, you're actually wrong about half the things you thought you needed to change.

I have eyes on the dive, you don't. But I think that what's most important for elevating the dive is just I want you to slow down your walk down the board. And that's going to change how the takeoff goes. And everything else will flow differently from that. And let's get your pacing right. And once you've mastered that to the point that you can do it on an autopilot and that second nature for you, then we'll go to the next change on the list.

And I think that this is something we could apply to probably all walks of our lives, right? That a lot of us, we make these mental notes and your inner critic is very good at just bombarding you with all the things you screwed up and what made you bad. And if you try to fix them all at once, you're really never gonna make real progress. So I think my read of the evidence is, we probably max out at being able to make somewhere between two and three changes in a given day or week,

but that's gonna vary depending on how automatic versus conscious the skill is and how much practice you have and the quality of the coaching around you, but I've landed at a place where after I do any kind of performance, whether I'm giving a speech or getting feedback on a draft, I've just started asking people, what is the one thing that's most important for me to improve? And then if I ask enough people, right, I'll end up with a longer list,

but the number of people who, you know, who peck talk slower, which was a really frequent comment in my teaching and speaking early on. The fact that everybody listed that as a critical change. Man, that that was gonna be my focus and I wasn't gonna worry about all the other stuff until I learned to sometimes tell a story and not talking to the pace where I tend to get really excited about something and then nobody can follow what I'm saying

and I sometimes even get lost. This reminds me of I had when I first got to ABC News in the year 2000, I had a great boss, her name is Amy Antelas. She's actually now quite a revered figure in the documentary world. And I used to go to her for advice about my anchoring of the news. We all consume news anchors and probably don't think much about the art or skill of it, but it actually is a really deep practice. And there are so many things,

how are you holding your hands? How do you look? What kind of closer are you choosing? What pace do you speak? How are you at reading the teleprompter? How are you at asking really good questions on the fly? How are you at reacting to your co-hosts on the set? There are so many things going on at any given moment

on a news desk and that's a real art and it's not unlike diving. There are 90 things you can come up with, but when I would go to Amy and we would watch tapes together, she would always just give me two or three very simple things. You're moving your hands too much. You're ending your questions with the word right question mark instead of actually formulating a question. And then I would just work on those and then come back and watch the tape again and she would just give me a few more. So long way of saying

that this fourth strategy you're listing really lands well with me. Coming up, Adam Grant, on how to think about external measures of success, ways to reimagine your relationship to failure, and we pivot to the not unrelated topic of procrastination, and he's got some strategies for dealing with that. Keep it here. Hey, I'm Arisha, 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.

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You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music or the Wondery app. Before we close out our discussion of perfectionism and move on to procrastination, which is not an unrelated topic. There's a phrase that kept surfacing in my mind as I prepared to do this interview with you, and it's a Buddhist phrase, so it's not very malifluous, but it's non-attachment to results. In other words, the argument is you can work your ass off and know that that's the variable you can control how hard you're working, et cetera, et cetera. But the world is so entropic that you can't control how the result is going to look or be received, that you need to practice this kind of non-attachment.

Does that land for you? It does, it does. Although, I think my challenge with attachment, I read about this a little bit in chapter three of Think You Can't And If I Remember correctly, is it's a really important skill. It's a very difficult one to build and exercise in the moments where you need it most. I feel like, I was kind of like saying, Dan, just take all the goals that you've

ever had helped here, that link to your core values and your deepest sense of self. And then just say, you know, it doesn't really matter. I don't care. Well, let me push back gently. I read it differently. It's not like, let's just take this book that I am around about all the time. So I'm gonna, in some it'll be six or seven years by the end of it, and I can get very tightly wound around how's it gonna be received, and I will care.

But I can know that there's so much out of my control that if I care too much, it will reduce my resilience and reduce my ability to move on to the next project when it's over. I agree with that. So maybe I want to edit a little bit the idea of attachment to results. I think you should be attached to the result you control. I think you should care about writing a book you're proud of. And what you're trying to detach to is then the uncontrollable, what kind of market reaction is it going to get? What are readers going to think? Is it going to hit all the best seller list? Is it going to be number one? How many weeks will it stay? Those metrics are not going to help anyone to focus on those. And so I don't think of those as your results.

I think of those as a byproduct of your result. Those are more about how the work is received than the result you produced. Okay, so that's actually very helpful because it's a kind of a reinforcement and a clarifying of the way I articulated this initially is the results you can be attached to is the quality of your work. The result you should not be attached to is how other people perceive the quality

of your work and how it does in the marketplace. Yeah, I think we're aligned there. I think, excuse me, I think that I learned something from your TED Talk, by the way, which is, let me crack that. I learned a lot of things from your TED Talk, but one of the things I really admired was when you paused and took a sip of water and kind of choked up. And I've always been the person who's afraid to be vulnerable like that on stage because I don't wanna look like I'm not prepared

or I'm not competent. And I was really moved by how candid you were. And it really reinforced how much what you were sharing is kind of heart and soul material, right? Not just head material. And so I'm trying to express more humanity as opposed to be a performance robot. I think, yeah, I think that you still need to care

about what other people think of your work, in part because you're not just writing a book for yourself. I remember talking to John Green about this, and John saying something to the effect of, I'm gonna put this in my own words, but not caring about anybody else's reaction to your book is a journal, not a book. You don't need to publish it, you're writing that for you, right? And if you choose to put it out into the world, you're making a gift for readers.

And so of course, you want them to love it. And that feedback is meaningful. You can learn things from it, you can apply them to your next book. But I think where we get into trouble is when that reaction from the audience superseeds our own judgment of whether we met our standard. And when the reaction from strangers overrides the feedback from people we know and trust whose judgment we care about more. So I guess I want you to detach from, tell me if you find this to be a reasonable middle ground. I want you to detach from the uncontrollable reactions

of strangers who are not necessarily your intended audience or not trying to give you constructive feedback. And I want you to stay attached to the people who are the audience you're writing for, or are in a good position to know what would help you in the future. I think that's an excellent further refinement, and I think it just goes back to this process

that you talk about as a way to handle perfectionism, which is curate a group of really good coaches who you're sharing your work with, because that is a form of caring about what other people think. And it is, but it seems like a healthy form of it. And control that variable as much as possible all the way until you release your work into the world, or do your dive.

And just don't be super attached to the random comments from assholes on Twitter. Yes. Yes, I think that is spot on. Unless, of course, those Twitter assholes happen to be experts on your content. Yes. And know something that could figure into the paperback. Yes.

Fair enough. There's another point you've made that I want to give you a chance to hold forth on here, which is having a reimagined relationship with failure. Oh, yeah. So this is actually why it started podcasting. So I let's go back. It's 2017. So, let's go back. It's 2017. I've published three books in four years. And I'm kind of at a crossroads of what do I want to do next. And I realize I am spending most of I give keynote speeches I've given before. I write articles on research I've already done. And other people's studies I've already read. And I don't feel like I'm learning. And I realized what was happening was I was basically doubling down on the things that

we're working. And I was repeating the tasks that were giving me positive reinforcement. And they were great dopamine hits. And it also felt like I was making a contribution. Like, when people seem to enjoy a talk, when teaching evaluations were encouraging. When somebody told me, Hey, this book really made a difference. And what was happening was I was falling into the perfectionist trap of kind of a limited circle of of competence. And I wasn't taking any risks. And I decided that I wanted to have an excuse that was built into my schedule for learning.

And I thought if I start a podcast, then instead of just teaching things that I've already learned, and instead of asking an audience to learn from me, they can actually learn with me in real time as I talk to people who know things that I don't and are knowledgeable about areas that I'm really curious about. And it was a huge risk because I didn't know how to promote a podcast. I didn't know whether anyone would want to listen to my voice. It's a different

kind of relationship with the audience than I've ever had before and I wasn't sure if it was gonna work, and I hesitated, and I waffled. And the reason I decided to go for it is I had set myself a failure budget, which was sort of a quota for how many times I was allowed to fail in a given year. And I realized that if my rate of failure was zero,

that that meant that I wasn't challenging myself and I wasn't growing enough. And so I said, I wanna have, in a typical year, I wanna have three projects that fail. Meaning, I didn't just get a six when I was aiming for a seven. I got a three and that means I am experimenting. I am pushing myself to stretch and evolve. And I think we could probably all benefit

from having that kind of failure budget because when something doesn't go well, I had an op-ed that bombed recently, and I also had two academic articles rejected, which 20 years in. At what point do I actually become fully capable? When that happened, like two rejections, great, I get to put those on my failure quota.

Check, as opposed to saying, oh no, those episodes of failing make me feel like I'm a failure. I'll just go back to the other one. I'll just go back to the other one. I'll just go back to the other one. I'll just go back to the other one. I'll just go back to the other one. I'll just go back to the other one. I'll just go back to the other one. I'll just go back to the other one. I'll just go back to the other one.

I'll just go back to the other one. I'll just go back to the other one. I'll just go back to the other one. I'll just go back to the other one. I'll just go back to the other one. Exactly, and then I can analyze why did the project fail did the project fail because it was a poor fit with my interest in skills. Did it fail because I failed to surround myself with the right collaborators. Did it fail because I had too much on my plate did it fail because I didn't invest enough effort in trying to learn what I needed to know to make it effective. Did it fail because I had bad luck? I have a friend who released what he says is the book he's proudest of on September 10th, 2001.

I mean, no one heard about the book, let alone read it. And it would be terrible if he felt like a failure in that situation, right? So I think it's also an opportunity to think about the role of luck and opportunity and realize a big part of failure is, his force is out of your control, but there are always things you could have done

to increase your odds of success. And so let's take away the lessons from that and then say, if I'm gonna do another project in this realm, or if I'm gonna take a risk on a completely different kind of project, what should I take away that will help me do better next time? I'm filing this away. Try it, you're on risk. Let's talk about a not unrelated subject, which is procrastination. Let's just start with the definition. How do you define procrastination? All right, so the formal definition in psychology is delaying a task, even though you expect that the delay will have a cost.

Interestingly, your personal issue was not procrastination, it was pre-crastination. I am a recovering procrastinator, Dan. It's true. What is procrastination? That's true. What is procrastination? In college, I finished my senior thesis a few months early, and my roommates found that extremely irritating. I'm the person who, when something is important to me, I dive into it immediately, and I want to finish it way ahead of schedule. What's so bad about that?

Well, I didn't think anything was bad about it at first. I was like, yes, I'm not stressed. I am constantly surprising people by under promising and over-delivering. I now have all this free time because I am not scrambling to meet a deadline. I don't pull all nighters, never pulled in all nighter in my life.

I'm like, this is great. And then I had a student, Chihishin, who told me that she had her most creative ideas when she was procrastinating. And I said, this is actually fascinating. We should test this. And I challenge her to figure out if she could gather data on it. And lo and behold, it turned out that people like me, pre-crastinators who don't put things off are less creative than people who sometimes procrastinate

because I plunge in with the first idea instead of waiting for the best idea. Oops. So this is linked to perfectionism. It is. It is. I think that earlier I start, the more I can perfect what I'm doing. And if I wait, I'm going to fall behind and maybe I'm going to run out of time and then it's going to be defective. At the same time, though, people on the, I think both extremes actually can be influenced by perfectionism.

Narotic perfectionists procrastinate a lot. They tend to be chronic procrastinators. And that's because they're constantly worrying that things are never going to be good enough. And so they have a hard time motivating themselves to start, they feel like I'm not ready yet, I'm not capable, I haven't prepared. This isn't my moment. And also then, at some point it becomes kind of a coping strategy, right, to say, okay,

whenever I start, I will use the entire window. And so if I'm writing a paper, if I started a month in advance, I will work on it for a month. And this paper probably only needs a day. And so I'm going to wait until the last day. And then, you know, it'll become better for my time management, even though it's terrible for my stress and anxiety.

My wife has in her an excellent book about imposter syndrome. And she's starting to work on it in earnest, but I can see some of this happening for her, this neurotic perfectionism, like I can't write, I'm not ready yet, or I can't write until like, the conditions are perfect, I can't just sneak it in into the interstices of the day, which is my strategy. Anyway, does that all sound like a domain to you?

Yeah, I think your wife should write that book for sure. And I think she should write it now. So I have a couple of reactions to that. The first one is just to one more call back to diving. I procrastinated a ton on new dives because those were the scariest and also the hardest to perfect. And one day, I literally stood on the board shaking

for almost an hour. And Eric finally just said, Adam, are you going to do this stuff? And I was like, ever? Yes, one day I will do this dive. And he said, great, then what are you waiting for? Dan, I hear his voice in my head every time. I feel like I'm not ready. I hear Eric asking, are you going to do this one day? And the answer is yes. And then I hear Eric asking, are you going to do this one day?

And the answer is yes. And then I think, well, what am I waiting for? And I would pose that question to your wife. I would also say, there's a psychologist, Bob Boyce, who studied people who kind of lived their lives in procrastination, which is graduate students, trying to finish a thesis or a dissertation. And he found in some randomized controlled experiments

that just training people to write in 15-minute blocks led them to finish faster. And they had all these excuses of, well, you can't. I mean, I can barely get a sentence out in 15 minutes. I need to wait until I have a three-hour window carved out. And he taught them just to ignore that and say, you know what, I can put together a rapid outline.

I could write a shitty first draft of a paragraph. And then what that did is I think it cured them of some of their perfectionism because they couldn't do something perfect in that tiny window, but they made these little bits of progress and over time those turned into these these indistertations and books.

Yes, this is a key strategy you've talked about publicly, carving out small windows of time and I'm actually literally more finished with this podcast, gonna go gently introduce that notion to my wife. I'm ready to take the blame. Okay, but I will blame you. Let's talk about a few other strategies

for dealing with procrastination. One of them is imagining failings spectacularly. How would that help? I don't know if it does, but I can tell you that, anecdotally, I have, yeah, I guess Dan, I'm a defensive pessimist sometimes. I feel like most of the day I'm more of an optimist. I kind of envision the great outcome I'm hoping for and then I try to make it happen. But I guess in areas where I'm procrastinating, it's often because I'm afraid it's not going

to go well and defensive pessimism kicks in. And then I'm the person who wakes up a week before the TED Talk, having just had a nightmare, that not only was my talk a disaster, but all my other videos were taken off the internet because there's no way that I could have possibly delivered those. The person who bombed this talk could not be, it must have been an actual imposter, a fraud, a clone. And I find that, obviously, I wake up in a panic cold sweat

in the moment, but as I think about that, it really brings me back down to Earth because I realize that has never happened. Yeah, I've stumbled a ton of times on stage, sage, sorry, I've even stumbled right now. But at this point, I probably given, I don't know, five, 10,000 talks between teaching and speaking and fireside chats, and I've never literally just

crashed and burnt. And so imagining that scenario makes me realize that the worst case scenario that I'm worried about, it's not that bad. Does that work for you or did the panic attack change that equation? Yes, because I have crushed and burned. That wasn't bad.

That was probably the best thing that's ever happened to your career. I was actually freaking out about freaking out about something recently and I was like, well, if I have another panic attack on the air, I could probably turn that into something too. So who knows? It's on brand.

Exactly. I mean, Dan, turn that into something too. So who does? It's on brand. Right exactly. I mean, Dan, obviously that says something about your character and your ability to turn a traumatic experience into a source of insight and personal growth. But in all seriousness, right? You, in some ways, this is even a better strategy for you than for me because you live

the actual worst case scenario that people are terrified of. And it turned out to, I think, be a net positive for you. Yes. In the long run. Yes. I think that's true with so many of the things we fear. It's not true for all of them, for sure. I'd be hard-pressed to make a case for losing a child. But often, with lesser-order magnitude fears, it happens and it's really not that bad.

That's a really interesting point. So, I guess the failures that we fear that are related to competence or performance, you think those mostly turn out to be beneficial? Often turn out to be beneficial, and I think it's about how you handle it. You outlined a strategy before for dealing with failure by depersonalizing it, decoupling it from the notion that you are inherently a failure. And looking at, like, what could I have done better, what were the market forces or the exogenous forces out of my control that impacted how it was received and then applying that

to the next project? I think that is possible with pretty much any kind of failure or a mishap. I think you're right. Let me just talk about a few other strategies for procrastination. You mentioned something called pre-commitment. Yes. So this is, I think for a lot of people,

this is essentially having an accountability buddy, right? And saying, hey, you could have your wife commit to sitting down and writing at certain times, right? And you could also build in a little incentive, incentive structure there. There's a, there's some great experiments where you ask people about the charity or cause they loath the most. And then they actually will, will make a small pre-donation. So, like, let's say your up in arms about gun violence, and you hate the NRA, you might give somebody 20 bucks

and say, if I don't follow through on meeting this deadline or if I don't show up and write every day this week at this time, I want you to donate my 20 to the NRA. And that can light a fire under you. Another thing you've talked about is for procrastinators to think about when they're doing the work that might have told themselves a story about I'll have to do it first thing in the morning, but for night owls, it's actually better to restructure your day. I'll pause in case you wanna say something about that, but there was another question I wanted to ask you.

You just sparked a quick thought for me, which is, we live in a world that favors morning people. And I think one of the reasons I'm a procrastinator is I'm a morning person. And I wake up ready to go, and I feel like I do my freshest, clearest, best work right away. And because the way that the world is structured, right?

Like we start school early, we start work early. The poor night out was among us. They are significantly more likely to procrastinate because their circadian rhythms actually put them in a position where they tend to do their optimal work in the late afternoon or sometimes even in the evenings or the overnight. And I think that we should think long and hard

about actually reimagining the work day and life cycles to better accommodate the circadian rhythms of night owls because we're basically missing out on their best creative thinking. I'm glad you sneak that in. What I was gonna say is that there's a kind of deep hack that you recommend for procrastination, which is that it's really about not managing your workflow as much as it is about managing your negative emotions.

Yeah, there's some really powerful work in psychology by Fuchsia, Sarwa, and Tim Pichel, where they've shown that we think procrastination is a time management problem. It's not. It's an emotion management problem. What causes people to procrastinate is they have unpleasant feelings that they associate with a particular task. Very few people procrastinate on things they love to do, right? You procrastinate when something is frustrating or confusing or difficult or anxiety provoking or just plain boring. And I think one of the ways that you can you can try to curb a little bit of your procrastination, which we all do, even as a procrastinator, I procrastinate on grading, I procrastinate on taxes and administrative work because it just don't like it. And if

it were up to me, like bureaucracy just would not exist in the world. Knowing that, I then can say, well, what are the contributing factors to that boredom? And are there ways that I can either change it, or I can reward myself for powering through a boring task? I'll sometimes, Dan, one of my favorite things to do is when I'm, look at the clock, okay, it's 9 p.m. haven't started will reward myself, I'll watch Severance, or I will give myself an excuse to read some sci-fi. And that always sort of gives me an extra little bit of motivation to get through the task I don't like to land on one I do. Coming up Adam talks about why it might be better to advise people

to follow their videos on the internet. And I'm gonna give myself that 9pm window to, a little bit of motivation to get through the task I don't like to land on one I do. Coming up Adam talks about why it might be better to advise people to follow their values rather than their passions. And finally Adam asks me to rate his interview performance, which leads to some soul searching from both of us. And it's coming up after this. This is a testament to you. There are so many other things we could have talked about.

There's guests you've had on recently who talk about things that would be right in the sweet spot for this show from goal setting to human delusion, to imposter syndrome, to pushing your limits, to the idea of not following your passions, all of which to say as a kind of credit to you that I didn't get too far in my agenda because you're so damn interesting and also as a kind of tease for your new show or new issue rethinking, which is produced by the good folks over at TED.

Anything else before I let you go that you wanna remind people that you've made and put out into the world that they should go look at? No, you've already been too generous and promoting too many things I've done over the years, Dan. I feel bad that we didn't get to your other topics. Well, let's just, there's just one.

Let's just do a minute or two on not following your passions. I worry because I often advise people, I think perhaps incorrectly, that you should listen to the things that you're excited about and think about that when you're pursuing life goals and professional goals, but apparently that's bad advice. It's incomplete advice. And sometimes tears people in an unhelpful direction. How about that? So there's some work by Carol Dwik and her colleagues, which shows that when you tell people to follow their passion,

they tend to approach it with a fixed mindset. And they think that their passion is something out there in the world waiting to be discovered. And the problem with that is it's hard to be passionate about things you suck at. And you often need to build up a certain level of skill or mastery before you really find the joy and the love and in activity. And so people will give up on something that they're not good at at first or something that they don't enjoy at first, not realizing that their passion could grow with progress. And this has been demonstrated with students as well as with entrepreneurs that as you build up competence and success, passion is a consequence of performance,

not just a cause. So I think we have to be careful there. I think the other reason I want to be careful about follow your passion is it's just not practical for some people. My passion was as a kid to make the NBA. I started high school under five feet tall, not going to happen. And I think the practicality of a job needing to support a family and a lifestyle, I think the I started high school under five feet tall, not gonna happen. And I think the practicality of a job needing to support a family and a lifestyle, I think the practicality of knowing that not everyone has the raw talent to make their passion their career means we should be cautious. I think what we should probably encourage people to do is to follow their values.

I think that there's some great work on this by Jan, Yohima, Witson colleagues, where they show that basically that passion can wax and win. Because what you found enjoyable today may not be that fun and exciting to you in 10 years. Maybe you get bored of it or it gets repetitive. But meaning tends to last, that if you focus on what gives you a sense of purpose, which more than anything else is helping other people,

then that tends to really maintain your level of motivation and commitment over time. And so I like the idea of saying, maybe follow your purpose rather than your passion. Well said, and I'm gonna be able to get you out on time because you need me. Press them, set it all so well. I guess your anchor habits are alive and well done.

My anchor habits will never die. Really appreciate you doing this. It's always a pleasure to have you on. Thank you. I always learn new things from the questions you ask and the insights you share. So this was my built-in learning excuse this week, since I don't have an interview this week.

I'm glad it wasn't your built-in failure time. Well, you should judge. All right, so give me your quick, zero to 10, how did this conversation go? And what's the one thing I could do better as a podcast guest? Honestly, no notes. I don't have any notes.

I think unacceptable. Not acceptable? Unacceptable. I want a zero to 10 and I want one note. And I will grease the wheels here by giving a note which is I often make this mistake when I'm the guest. And I think I felt when I'm the guest. And I think I felt like I made it today.

I think a bunch of my answers could have been half as long and we could have done more back and forth with you riffing on things I said rather than you team up kind of things for me to comment on. And then we move on. I wouldn't have said that. I think I could have made more conversation less interview. Okay. I wouldn't have said that.

A lot of my guests are Dharma teachers, and so they go really long, and I've really trained myself not to interrupt to listen because the audience rewards me for doing that. So, I don't, at least this audience rewards me for just letting people go long, because usually, almost always, what they're saying is so damn useful.

And if it isn't, we edit it down. You are for a supposedly impatient person. You are a remarkably patient listener. I've been trained by actually listening to what the audience likes. I used to interrupt and jump in a lot. And I know that when I listen to podcasts, I hate that when the host is jumping in a lot. I'm listening to the episode in no small

part because I want to hear what the guest has to say. So, okay, I'll give you a nine and I'll say the only note, but I didn't really know that I would have wanted this until you yourself brought it up is and I don't feel like this is some big shortcoming of yours. But maybe that's because I don't know you well enough, but you talk to yourself as perhaps at times being a performance robot. I don't see you that way, but I do very much value what Brunei Brown would call vulnerability done right where you talk about things that are below the neckline. And I say this less as a note is more of a compliment.

I am interested enough in you that I would want more of that from you. That's great feedback. Well, first of all, thank you for the nine. I'll try to believe it. And that as a recovering perfectionist still, I will say that met my standard. So I'll take it. Apparently, I'm a better podcast guest than I was diver. So that's good to know.

I love your note. I think more vulnerability is something I could always do more of. And I think, you know, just thinking out loud about it, I think one of the mistakes I make, which was what Brane would call armor from much earlier in my life and career, is when I do show vulnerability, it's often about past failures and mistakes. I talk about my early struggles as a diver, but eventually I overcame them and I got pretty good. I talk about my early struggles teaching,

but I've become a successful teacher. I talk about my early fears of public speaking, but I've mostly gotten over those. And I think what you're highlighting for me in the way that you articulated that feedback is current vulnerability. Things I'm struggling with now, yes, that is an excellent note.

And I'm really glad I pushed back on your no notes. I'm glad you did too, because a note I've gotten is that sometimes I don't give enough feedback. So I think that's an accurate note. And I will say also that you're really encouraging me to do some meta vulnerability. Like, I'm not good at vulnerability. Yes, but that I'm not.

I'm not. That's a fact. That also could be a kind of armor. It is. I think that I'm always wanting to make sure that I have something to offer and too much of my identity is anchored in wanting to have knowledge or expertise to share as opposed to

relatable experience and emotions Right, and I but I do think that's defensible and this is a skill This is a skill that you can get better at and oh by the way you don't have to I understand why it's in some ways It can be more of more service to talk about past struggles because you've got your stick down on it. Like you've learned from it and therefore you can talk about it in a way that isn't useful. And I'm a teacher. Yes. Exactly. It's scarier to talk about current issues because you don't have a pad answer. You haven't necessarily learned from it. But I think the lesson that you can teach

by talking about current struggles is the talking about the current struggles is being open in about the areas where you're not at your best. I think that's exactly, I don't wanna say it's exactly right. I think it's wise and extremely helpful because exactly right is perfectionist.

When I get like, Dan, you just, you nailed the feedback and I'm giving you an A plus for your feedback. But no, I think it's really on point for me. And I like the idea of thinking about vulnerability as a skill that I never thought about this before, but you now have me thinking about what lessons can I teach, not only to others, but to myself, right, as I do it,

about how to talk about struggles. And in particular, there are lots of ways to do that that don't cast doubt on your confidence. And I need to give that more thought. I love this. That sounds like a key obstacle for you is casting doubt on your confidence. Yeah, yeah, I think it is.

I think in the psychology of status, I learned when I wasn't popular as a kid, I learned to earn respect and admiration through excellence, I guess in the classroom and as a diver, and then through trying to be kind and helpful to others. to be kind and helpful to others. And the idea that someone would think that I'm not smart or not talented at the things I've invested in in trying to master, and the idea that somebody would think I'm not caring, and I'm not concerned about others. Those would cut me really deep.

And so yeah, there's definitely some armor on both of those fronts that I need to learn how to remove, except for you're removing it right now by all the words you've just uttered. And I think that- Wait, you're going to play this? No, you should absolutely play this, I'm just kidding. But this is, Dan, this is the kind of conversation that I think we could have had more of. If I talked a little bit less and we did more back and forth, right? Because it goes off the arc of you want to deliver some practical lessons for managing

perfectionism and procrastination, but it really speaks to the deep challenges that a lot of us face. And I think that when we all have these past hauntings, right, of like me proving my competence is no longer relevant, like full stop. I know that, right? Intellectually. I don't feel it viscerally in every situation. And I still find myself in moments where I'm like, I have to make sure it's clear that I have

useful information. I'm like, why? How many books do I need to sell? How many podcasts listeners will one day lead me to say, yes, but it's not about that. It's not like, I don't doubt that I have something of value to offer. I don't wanna end up missing the mark for the audience and having them feel like I didn't get what I wanted or I didn't learn anything. And that I think is where the armor comes from

is this performance might not be up to standard. Yeah, totally, totally get it. And it goes so deep from you, you protected yourself in social situations by excellence and helpfulness. And if you fall short of those standards, it's scary. And I think what we're landing is actually, there is excellence and helpfulness and service

in the mere act of saying, I'm a fuck up on this currently. Yeah, that's so true. And that's why I was, I think, 13 minutes late to this recording, because despite at least, nearest of Allison encouraging me to be on time more often, I still screwed up more often than not.

And I feel a little guilty about it, apparently not guilty enough. But that's an example of an ongoing struggle that I've thought about a ton. I've read a lot of research on. I haven't cracked it. And I have not figured out how to manage myself effectively to be on time. And I have lots of very well articulated excuses for why this continues to happen. But maybe I'm going to see this up as a current struggle that I

want to talk about more and then kind of maybe work throughout loud and maybe Dan, you can help me with that. But I'm also mindful of the fact that I committed to try meditation after a certain book tour and I haven't done it. So, questions, are you going to hold me accountable on this one? Where you have failed to hold me accountable on meditation? I really resist holding people accountable on meditation, but I asked you to do it. I know, I know, I know, I know. Just because I was, you made the best argument I've ever heard, and I was curious about whether you could unlock a version of it that I actually thought I might benefit from. What's the best version for you of being held

accountable on either meditation or punctuality. I think there are two things. One is just to check in and ask me if I've made any progress. And the other is to offer something I haven't tried yet with meditation. It would be a quick exercise to do or a coach to chat with with punctuality. It would be maybe giving me a goal or a habit to test out.

All right, dooly noted. I'm on your team now. Counting as a coach. Dan Harris enlisted always. to test out. All right. Do a lead noted. I'm on your team now. Count me as a coach. Dan Harris enlisted. Always. It's such a pleasure to talk to you. I didn't bother me at all that you were whatever minutes late.

And I'm sorry for holding you late on the backside. No, this is me now trying to make up for it, right? I say, okay, I promised you a certain amount of time. You have nothing to pick up for. Nothing. All right, I'm going to let you go, but everybody go listen to Adam's podcast, Plural. Thank you again, Adam.

Thanks, Dan. Thanks again to Adam Grant, love having him on the show. Go check out his new podcast. That's rethinking with Adam Grant. I highly recommend. I want to thank everybody who worked so hard on this show. 10% happier is produced by Gabriel Zuckerman, DJ Kashmir, Justin Davie and Lauren Smith.

Our supervising producer is Marissa Schneiderman, Kimmy Regler, is our managing producer, and our executive producer is Jen Poient. Scoring and mixing by Peter Bonaventure of Ultraviolet Audio. And of course, thank you for listening. We'll see you soon. 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 1-3-plus in Apple Podcasts.

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