Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 568: The Many Benefits of a “Paradox Mindset” | Dolly Chugh

Episode Date: March 8, 2023

The human animal doesn’t love paradox. We love a clear, simple story. Us versus them. Good versus evil. But life is rarely like that. This is especially true when it comes to wrestling with history. Our guest today calls it the patriot’s dilemma. How do you love your country while also acknowledging the painful and horrifying stuff that has happened in the past?Dolly Chugh is a professor at the New York University Stern School of Business where she teaches MBA courses in leadership and management. This is her second time on the show. The last time she came on, she spoke about the concept of being “good-ish.” One of the reasons we get defensive when people criticize us is that we feel like it’s a threat to our precious notion of being a good person. But if you have a good-ish mindset, then there’s always room to grow. Her new book, A More Just Future, encourages us to do that for America.Content Warning: This episode includes brief mentions of slavery and violence.In this episode, we talked about:Why Dolly was scared to write this bookWhat the home team bias is and how it shows up when we think about our pastWhat belief grief isThe “long time ago illusion”And, what Dolly calls being a gritty patriot Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/dolly-chugh-568See 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, Dan Harris. Greetings, my fellow suffering beings. The human animal does not love paradox. We love a clear, simple story. Us versus them, good versus evil, but life is rarely like that. This is especially true when it comes to wrestling with or reckoning with history. My guest today calls it the Patriots dilemma. How do you love your country while also acknowledging

the painful and horrifying stuff that has happened in the past? Dolly Chug is a professor at New York University's Stern School of Business, where she teaches MBA courses in leadership and management. This is her second time on the show. The last time she came on, she taught me about a concept called good-ish.

One of the reasons we get defensive when people criticize us is that we feel like it's a threat to our precious notion of being a good person, at least that's true for me. But as Dolly says, if you have a Good-ish mindset, then there's always room to grow. Her new book, which is called a more just future, basically, encourages us to do the whole good-ish thing for America. In this conversation, we talked about why Dolly was scared to write this book, what the home team bias is and how it shows up when we think about our past frequently as a nation, what belief grief is, the long time ago illusion illusion and what Dolly calls being a gritty patriot. A few quick notes, there are some brief mentions of slavery and violence here. There's

also a conversation about Barbara Walters, my former colleague, the great ABC News anchor, that conversation took place before Barbara passed away. So you'll hear us reference her as if she's still alive, which sadly she is not. 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.

Dolly Chug, welcome back to the show. It is so good to be back then. It's a pleasure. You have said you were scared to write this book. Why? Oh, gosh, Dan. Yeah, well, I really love my country. And in this book, it is a love letter to a country I love that sometimes I don't like everything in.

I fear that people will misinterpret that. They will not see my love of country and only see my desire to see certain things change. And I'm too much of a people pleaser for that. I really bothers me that people might think that. The book's been out for a little bit. Have your fears come true at all? Not yet, not at all. In fact, quite the opposite. I had certainly hoped and intended this book would find people grappling with similar kind of desires as me. But I guess I didn't realize how much people were looking for it or maybe looking for it's the wrong word. But I think people, I'm gonna compare myself

to the iPhone, Dan. You ready for this? I'm gonna compare this book to the iPhone. I don't even use an iPhone, but I've heard Steve Jobs talk about like people didn't know they needed the iPhone until they had the iPhone and it filled a certain need. And while this is nothing like that in scale, I think there's sort of a similar role this book is playing, whereas there's a lot of content out there that offers historical

knowledge. My book does not offer that. It just offers tools for grappling with that knowledge. And I think that's something people maybe didn't realize they needed. How did the book come about? Well, I came about because I needed tools because I, you know, it's a research,

research situation where if I had to pick a point when I was having a rather smug parenting year back maybe a decade ago and my kids were kind of kindergarten first grade-ish and I was reading to them every night and they were old enough to start reading themselves but I was like no I'm going to keep going with the reading every night and we read the whole little house in the prairie book, which is like eight books of 200 pages each. It took a full year.

And they were so into these books. Like, I think they literally thought Laura Ingalls Wilder, who wrote the books about her own family and the 1800s was like their sister. She would show up and they're like drawings, like draw your family. And Laura would be in there. And my husband and I even decided we would go to South Dakota

and Minnesota and spend a whole week over the summer driving the kids around and showing them the historical sites. And we were so smog, we were like, this is educational, this is budget friendly, this is patriotic. And I do remember literally standing on a prairie with my kids in prairie dresses,

which they wore all week because cuteness. And I remember standing there and having this thought of, wait a minute, whose land was this before the 1800s when the Ingalls family built their little house. And I immediately shut down that line of thought. I was like, why don't know how to think about that? I don't know how to think about the year I've spent feeding my kids a narrative that didn't

include that part of the history. So I just shut it down and I didn't talk about it with my kids. And in the decades since then, I've wondered why I didn't and why I didn't talk about it with my kids. And in the decades since then, I've wondered why I didn't and why I didn't think about it myself. I didn't talk about it with my kids. And then one thing after another has come up that sort of evoked similar emotions and responses from me. Juneteenth, Tulsa Massacre,

there was a common theme of me not knowing something or thinking I knew it and then not knowing how to kind of unlearn what I thought I knew. So in the book you've come up with seven strategies and I thought maybe we should have a romp through all seven you ready for that. Let's romp. Okay, the first is see the problem which will be familiar to anybody who's gone to AA or looked at meditation? Yeah, absolutely. And Dan, when I was thinking about this interview today, I was also like kind of just reviewing the chapters. And mind you, I spent a few years immersed in this topic, writing

the book. It suddenly jumped out at me for the first time, like how meditation principles the first time, like how meditation principles seem to be woven through, especially the first three chapters, beginning with seeing the problem. And I think particularly it's seeing the problem without judging it, just seeing it for what it is. And the problem that I'm describing is what I call the Patriots dilemma, this idea that, in some ways, that more deeply we love our country, the more intensely we love our country, the harder it is to sort of work towards and understand and acknowledge and notice what would make our country stronger going forward. And so that patriots dilemma is something that

I'm thinking a lot about. And the sort of kicker on it is nostalgia is such a great drug. And we see it in the music and the fashion and the travel sites like nostalgia is a billion dollar industry because we really are drawn to it. And sometimes seeing the problem kind of puts us at odds with some of the nostalgic narratives we love so much. If nostalgia is a kind of bias, there's another bias, which is home team bias. Yeah, and there's lots of research by psychologists. I'm a psychologist to be clear, not a historian. I am not the one you should come to for any sort of expertise in that domain. What I can share is things like the home team bias.

This was a study where there was a very intense football game with lots of claims of bad sportsmanship and foul play by both sides. And the psychologists afterwards got fans from both sides and they showed them video of the game and they're like, here's the video. Tell us based on what you see what happened. And people were very adamant that it was their team that was wronged. And so this home team bias literally affects what we see. We can see the same thing, but interpret it differently. And it's sort of harmless in a football game. It kind of escalates though when we think about our emotional

relationship with our country's past, because our own perspective and our own family, our own community, our own racial identity, that perspective is going to affect how we understand what's come before us. Where did you net out at the end of the day about how we can see the problem? Again, step number one in seven steps, given the biases that do exist quite naturally. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, where I knit out is sort of with this idea that we want to be a little bit in

our mindset like historiographers. Historiographers are historians who study how we study history. And what horror storyographers do is they take stock of whose perspective is this coming from? Or what might be left out of this story? And sometimes it's staring us right in the face is like, you know, I've celebrated July 4th my whole life, red, white and blue

and all the joys of that day and what it honors in our country. And I literally until a few years ago, it didn't dawn on me that July 4th, 1776 was not a day when everybody became free. And so the historiographer approach is to sort of take this lens of, what am I sort of not seeing and what's right in front of me? So anytime a holiday rolls around or there's a big news story

where we get into an argument about painful history to put the goggles on of historiography. What is the narrative I've been served and who served it to me? Yeah, exactly. An easy thought experiment is to think about anything that's happened in your family. And if you were to go around and ask everyone who would have some knowledge of that incident, what happened? Would you get the same story from your uncle, from your parents, from your siblings? Would everybody tell the same story? And almost every family, the answer is no. There would be some big variance in that story. And the same is true for history. It's just another story.

How do we find alternative sources? Because most of us aren't spending a ton of time steeped in history. So it seems like it would take some work to get a different point of view on a major historical event. Yeah, I think right now it's actually become much easier than it was just a few years ago. So the easiest approach I've offered to people

is whatever media you like to consume or whatever content, podcasts, movies, video games, books, whatever it is, look at the last five to 10 that you consumed and see how much similarity there is in perspective between the creators and the voices that are centered between them and between you and them. And then see if you can just make it, you know, let's use your number 10% more varied in the content you're getting in the voices that are represented. That alone will start adding different perspectives about lived experience and where that lived experience comes from historically. I mean, history doesn't have to be like textbooks and documentaries. We talk about history all the time, right? We're always referring to sort of things that came before us and our grandparents and holidays. Those are all examples of history and historical narratives.

Yeah, so if I'm hearing you correctly, you're recommending something that I've recommended a lot to people is try to vary your media diet and try to expose yourself on the regular to ideas you may not like. I love that. I'm just thinking back to that moment of you standing on the regular to ideas you may not like. I love that. I'm just thinking back to that moment of you standing on the prairie and remembering, oh yeah, this land belonged to indigenous people before little house on the prairie started cranking up their cameras and pumping out family entertainment.

You did not want to see it in the moment and that is so common, we don't want to see it. So even if we've decided, okay, I'm going to think like a historiographer, I'm going to start diversifying my media diet. I'm committed to seeing things clearly. There is just this resistance that's pretty deep. Have you been able to overcome that and what do you recommend for others? Yeah.

Well, I mean, that actually sets us up for the next tool in the book, the next chapter, which is dressing for the weather. And I do think I've made some progress myself on this, which is dressing for the weather refers to, you know, it's like when you go for an outing and you don't look at the forecast or you're surprised by some rainfall and you don't have enough layers, you don't have an umbrella, you don't have some block. And it really messes with the day. And that kind of anticipation of what's coming can be really useful here. And so dressing for the weather by that, I mean to expect that there will be some emotions that feel like, ugh, they might feel like disbelief or anger or shame

or guilt. And this is another place where I thought it reminded me of what I've been learning as a very beginner to meditation, but the piece about regulating emotions, like how a lot of what we're doing is just allowing emotions to come up, but not be owned by them and know that they will pass, that we don't have to sort of view them as permanent in the experience we're having. And so part of dressing for the weather is thinking about where those emotions are coming from, and I talk in the book about social identity, which is distinctive for my individual identity. My individual identity is that idolatialug, might feel defensive if somebody says, I'm not a good mother, or I'm not a good teacher, or something like that.

My social identity is more about the groups I belong to. So I might, it's not that somebody sets me directly about me, but they might say, well, mothers who work are not good parents. Like that, that feels like even though they're not saying it specifically about me, it feels like it's specifically about me. And so our social identity sometimes get threatened when we are learning about a holiday like Thanksgiving and hearing that it wasn't actually quite as congenial and warm and an example of solidarity as we thought we might feel threatened like that's a critique of me or it's a critique of a group I associate with in terms of my family's history pressing for the weather means just knowing that's going to come up. Like history is complicated,

people are complicated, emotions are going to come up. You have a term you use belief grief. What is that? Yeah belief grief comes from a like a really personal place for me of like when I would sort of learn something about my country and be like, wow, I didn't know that. I didn't know that the GI Bill was basically for white veterans, not black veterans. My whole life, I thought that was for all veterans. And so that bummed me out that I was so out of touch. And so that feeling afterwards of really what's it just felt like grief to me of a very particular sort of really feeling the loss of something that felt true and

real for me, I felt like I needed a word for it. So I called it belief grief. It's interesting because it's got two sides. Your sort of grieving that youth of America was better than that on some level. On the other hand, you're sort of grieving because you realize that you were out of touch and you believed in something without questioning it. Yes. Oh my God, that's such a great point. And actually that second part of it, the one about, I'm also grieving my belief that I am in touch and informed. And like, I would have thought I would have known that. But it turns out, by the way, most Americans don't know that. I wrote about it in my first book.

And I, in a lot of talks I gave back when we did more in-person talks, I would often ask for a show of hands of how many people knew it. And the majority of people didn't, at least this was 2018-2019. And that included in rooms of educators. So it says to me, this isn't about individuals knowing or not knowing something. It's about kind of our systems where we just haven't brought this knowledge forward in a way that people could easily know it. Just to reset for folks, we are on the second of seven tools

for dealing with America's painful history. And the second is dress for the weather. You've got a number of tenants, some of which we've covered. The next few we haven't yet, avoid denial is one of them. Say more about that. Yeah, absolutely. So the way to do that is through returning to our values, returning to the things that sort of

sit as very true, as consistently, deeply true for us. Like, I might have a value around equality. I might have a value around liberty. And returning to that time and time again, to the things we care about has been shown in research to help people ride through things that make them want to shut down, which is what denial is. And this has been done in research with first-year students who are worried about whether they belong and the college they're in.

When they have them right about their values and a sort of short exercise or think about their values, they see a greater sense of belonging and a greater academic performance even months later because there's something that unconsciously sort of becomes ingrained in us when we can get out of that. Like, I believe this, I don't believe this, I deny this makes me feel bad, emotions, emotions, and go back to just these are the things I believe in. Another principle you talk about is flexing yourself.

Yeah. Yeah. And that's very much tied to what I just described that sort of technical term there as values affirmation, as the research I was describing. And so what we're doing there is basically filling ourself, like if you think of instead of like glass half empty, half full, think of self, half empty, half full, we're kind of filling up our self with that values. And so I called that flexing your self system and giving it some juice with that affirmation of your values. Anything more to say on dressing for the weather before we move on to the third, which is possibly my favorite. Oh, let's go to your favorite.

Okay. Well, you talk about embracing paradox. And I think this is just one of the muscles that are culture right now as atrophied, which is we're in an either or moment. We're on one side of the tribal divide or the other and just firing shots at each other across that divide. Instead of understanding that it is undeniable that two things can be true at the same time.

Yes, exactly. That paradox is real, that people are complicated, the world is complicated. That it's actually rarely true that things are simple and clear-cut. So in this chapter, I talk about embracing paradox. And I rely heavily on research that's really helped me from Wendy Smith and Mary Ann Lewis and others,

where they've shown that, first of all, our brains do like consistency and coherence, which is the opposite of paradox. Our brains sort of want the puzzle piece to fit just right and to straighten the crooked picture on the wall. That's a natural reflex. At the same time, our brains are robust enough that we can tell our brains sometimes to conflicting statements can both be true. So, for example, our forefathers did extraordinary things, like a defeated extraordinary odds in building this country had an extraordinary vision, wrote extraordinary documents undeniably true. And many of those forefathers enslaved other humans

while they were doing it. They tortured those humans if they tried to escape, if they tried to protect their families. And they did all this at the same time that they were writing about liberty, justice, and equality. I mean, even saying that, I can like a little bit like, like I almost want to fact check myself is like, am I sure that's true? It is true.

There's no ambiguity about it in the factual record. And so we've got two conflicting statements that are both true that create a paradox for us. And so what the research says is, when there's a paradox, we can tell our brains that it's possible for a paradox to exist. And when we do that, we're activating a paradox mindset. And it actually really loosens up our mind. The research shows that we become more creative in how we look for solutions.

We become more resilient and sort of writing out things that are difficult emotionally. And I think that's the key to sort of engaging with our emotional relationship with our country is that as you said, we don't feel like we have to pick. It's either this is true or that is true. We simply allow both to be true. I'm picking up there and you do say this in the book that the paradox mindset is useful not just in dealing with painful history, but also dealing with lots of problems we may have in our day-to-day life.

Yes. I know. I mean, as a parent, I feel like it's a very daily thing that my children can be so loving and they can be such pains and both can be true. I can feel like I'm killing it as a parent and feel completely inadequate on a daily basis. Like there's so many paradoxes that I feel like just swim through our lives. And I've been, when my kids were little, we once were on a plane that got struck by lightning and of course we were all very freaked out. We were totally fine. Nothing happened, but it was just a little startling and in the moment we were all freaking out. And I think it was actually if I remember right, it was either my kids first or second plane right ever. We had like waited a pretty long time to take them on planes.

And so I remember saying to them like, oh, we just got an adventure point and sort of coming up with that on the fly that like, oh, this is a good thing that we just got struck by lightning. Let's see how many adventure points we're going to get on this trip. And that kind of led to this idea of paradox points that let's see how many just like trips never go exactly as planned. And paradox is all around us. And if our brain is seeking consistency, it's going to continually be frustrated. But if it's seeking paradox, we are going to be racking up the points. And that, I think, allows us to sort of see things more as they are as opposed to how we wish the picture was straight on the wall.

Is it just about racking up points or is it about seeing situations more clearly so that they're more pliable than they may seem at first. Yeah, well, you're talking to the one who is motivated to meditate by her meditation streak. So, so, racking up the points helps me see the things, but there are probably more evolved listeners who don't need that. Can you say more though about how, okay, if I'm dealing with a difficult colleague or a difficult child? How the paradox mindset can help me there and like what wiser steps it might lead me to?

Sure. Yeah, let's play that out. So let's say I have a difficult colleague and this is somebody who You know my I come home and I say My god, they're such a jerk. They're so unresponsive, they don't respect me, like all the things. And that's the story I'm telling myself. But what if it's also true that that person has done a lot to build my organization or support the team or invested a lot of themselves in the work? Both of those things can simultaneously be true.

There could be friction in my relationship with them and they could be deeply invested in something I'm deeply invested in. If I allow both of those things to be true, rather than viewing this as an interpersonal problem or someone I need to sort of distance myself from, maybe I can see something we share in common about our commitment to this work or our commitment to this team.

And I'll see a different way to engage with them as opposed to like, you know, if I see them coming down the hall, I'm going to kind of duck into the conference room. Yes. I think that's very useful in terms of interacting with a difficult colleague. It can be very useful even in my own head as I'm thinking about would I and the writer were the wrong in that situation? And it's often just not that binary. And that just makes for ball mirror weather internally and better behavior externally. I find when I can remember to do it. I know. When we can remember to do it, that's the thing. Well, that's why it's fun to

get points because our lizard brains will keep looking for them. Coming up, Dolly Chug on connecting the historical dots, the long time ago illusion and all the ways in which the past is still with us, that's after this. Celebrity feuds are high stakes. You never know if you're just going to end up on page 6 or Du Moir or in court. I'm Matt Bellesai. And I'm Sydney Battle, and we're the host of Wondery's new podcast, Dis and Tell, where each episode we unpack a different iconic celebrity feud. From the build up, why it happened, and the repercussions.

What does our obsession with these feud say about us? The first season is packed with some pretty messy pop culture drama, but none is drawn out in personal as Britney and Jamie Lynn Spears. When Britney's fans form the free Britney movement dedicated to fraying her from the infamous conservatorship, Jamie Lynn's lack of public support, it angered some fans, a lot of them. It's a story of two young women who had their choices taken away from them by their controlling parents, but took their anger out on each other. And it's about a movement to save a superstar, which set its sights upon anyone who failed to fight for Brittany.

Follow Disenthal wherever you get your podcast. You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music or the Wondering app. The next psychological tool is connecting the dots. What do you mean by connecting the dots in the context of reckoning with history? Yeah, so this is the idea that things in the past seem like they were a long time ago. And so a lot of times, and I know I feel this reaction sometimes of like, why do I even,

like why does it matter? You know, why are they talking about redlining? Or why are they talking, like that, okay, that happened, but what does it have to do with today? There's enough to deal with today. Why do we need to like unpack all this stuff from the past? It's such a long time ago. But as I was writing this book,

one of the things that became more and more apparent to me is that is a bit of an illusion that things are a long time ago, that our brains play a trick on us. There's what a psychologist Eugene Caruso and others refer to as wrinkles in time, an asymmetry, and how we view things that have already happened in the past versus things that could happen in the future. So, for example, our brains view the past more blurrally than the future, which is so counterintuitive to me because the past has already happened, so it should be more vivid in my brain than something that hasn't happened yet, which should be blurrier. But in fact, it's exactly the opposite and how our brain processed it. So there's something about our brain

when things have already happened that it kind of just wants to like put it to rest. And I think that's what contributes to what I've been calling the long time ago illusion. And we have to kind of work against that because the past is living in the present. When people say to me, oh, I guess she wrote this book because history doomed to repeat itself. And I'm like, that may be true. I mean, that seems like a reasonable thing. But actually, I think it's not so much about

the future. It's about the present. Like, I look around the present. I don't understand half of what's going on in the world. And it turns out things that feel like a long time ago that really weren't a long time ago help us understand today. Forget even tomorrow. I saw a thing on social media the other day and as you know, everything on social media is true. So I was sure this one was. But I did fact check it and it was true. So I'm going to quote it, though I don't know who was the original source. It said that if Anne Frank and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. were alive today, they would be the same age as Barbara Walters.

And I said, that cannot be true. And then I looked it up and they were all born in 1929. And it's like, what? The Holocaust seems like such a long time ago. The Civil Rights Movement seems like such a long time ago. You know, so this is an example of what we have to work against to connect the dots. And then what I do in this chapter is offer a few examples of ways in which the dots connect everything from how research that shows how our thoughts from the past get passed on generation to generation, how our speech gets passed on and carries attitudes generation to generation, how systems like laws and housing, systems, how there's

many people who believe that their ancestors are still with them, that they can sort of speak to them or there's a spiritual connection. So that's another way some people see connections between the past. And then lastly, there's fascinating research about how trauma passes on, and this is from the field of epigenetics. In these studies, they show, for example, in studies with mice, that so there were mice that they gave mild shocks to in the presence of a cherry blossom scent. Then that mouse went and was bred to create more mice. The new mice never met the father. The father was the one that was exposed to the cherry blossom.

The new mice, the ones that came from the mice that were exposed to the cherry blossom, with the shock, show an aversive reaction to cherry blossom sense. And the idea here is that we think of the genotype as what passes on, not the phenotype, the expression of the gene, but what epigenetic researchers are finding is that there is some lived experience that can actually be passed on from generation to generation

as in this cherry blossom study. So that's an example of how trauma can also carry on through generation. So the idea here is when we try to connect the dots to recap our brains are working against us. They make things look blurry. They lead us to blame the victim more. And yet there's all these ways in which the past is living in the present. And if we don't connect the dots, we overlook vital dynamics. Yeah, and actually we don't just overlook it. I mean, this is where people say, well, it's hard or it's boring

or I don't really want to do it. What I'm realizing is somebody who's pretty recently thinking in this way in the last few years, is it's actually liberating and exhilarating and clarifying. The world just makes more sense. Conflicts that appear silly, appear a little less silly. There's some root or cause to it. Just the sort of patterns we see in society, all the disparities on racial disparities on

every meaningful outcome there is in the United States. the sort of patterns we see in society, all the disparities on racial disparities on every meaningful outcome there is in the United States, there is a racial disparity. That really makes no sense if you don't understand the dots and how they connect. It's hard to come up with a good explanation for why in 2022, that's still happening. But when you look at the historical dots, it actually starts to make a lot more sense. When you start to think about generational trauma and also structural bigotry that may or may not exist now, but certainly existed not that long ago and can't but leave noxious residue. Exactly. Well said.

Coming up, Dali Chug, on the danger of racial fables, the concept of basking in reflective glory, and she takes us through the three final psychological tools for wrestling with our past. Keep it here. All right. So number five on your list of seven psychological tools is to reject racial fables. What does that mean? Yeah. So, okay. So maybe I'll tell a racial fable and that'll illustrate what one is. So, I want to tell the story of Louise McCauley. She was 42-year-old African-American activist. Being an activist wasn't her day job. She had to work in a day job, but she spent her evenings and her weekends volunteering with the NAACP. This is in the 1950s. She'd been doing this

her entire adult life, and it came from even when she was a kid, her family worried about her lack of deference to the norms of society where, for example, on a sidewalk, a black person had to move off the sidewalk, if a white person was coming the other way, and she wouldn't do that. In fact, they worried so much that she would get hurt that they moved to a different home where she could walk to school in a way that they felt was safer for her, given her rebellious streak. She made many attempts to be registered to vote at a time when there were very onerous tests that were required to register

to vote and only 3% of black people in the south were eligible to vote because of these tests and she kept going back and back and back until she finally got registered. So the point being she was an activist, she was rebellious. And so it's probably not a huge surprise that one day she was seated in a seat in a public place that was expected to be given up if a white person wanted her seat and she wouldn't get up. And so the person in charge said, you have to get up, she said, not getting up. They called the police, the police came.

They said, gotta get up. She said, I'm not getting up and she added, why do you always push us around? And one thing led to another, she was arrested. Dr. Martin Luther King got wind of this, came to town. And from this moment on a bus where Rosa Louise McCauley parks would knock it up, the Montgomery bus boycott was born. And of course Rosa Parks is a name that we all know, a story we think we all know. But the facts that

I just shared about her life that are very well documented are not the story we usually hear. What we usually hear is a racial fable in which an elderly woman, she was 42, was tired. She is said on the record she was not particularly tired that day. She was as she said just tired of giving in, accidentally became an activist that day when she wouldn't give up her seat. That's the story we hear,

and that she raised this issue and Dr. King came and amplified the issue, and the vast majority of Americans, especially white Americans were like, oh my gosh, yes, of course, let's fix that. And it was fixed, and that's the civil rights movement, and that's our victory that took place a long time ago. That's the fable we hear.

And the question is, why is that fable so much more attractive to us than the reality, which was she and many others had made many attempts, just like this one in the past, that had been unsuccessful, that she was not different. She was actually quite vocal and rebellious. She would be the kind of person who might annoy people with her conviction. Why is that fable so much more seductive to us? And what I offer as an explanation is that we all love stories, human beings, are storytelling animals. And the simplicity going back to sort of our minds desire for that simplicity leads us to a fable that feels neat and controllable and in which we can look back with pride at sort of what we assume the role we would have played in that situation that we would have been sort of

applauding Rosa Parks. In fact, the vast majority of Americans were not in support of what was happening. The vast majority of white Americans felt even if they agreed with the change, it was happening too fast. Martin Luther King was viewed as radical at the time. And so the danger of these fables are that they lead us to think that what we think happened in the past, which was linear and neat and admirable, is what we're going to see in the present when we're trying to push for change. And when we look at the efforts to make change and we go, well, that didn't work or those

protests aren't doing anything or, you know, I don't like the approach that's being taken. And we don't realize that that's exactly what has happened in previous occasions, instead of the racial favor we believe. Right. So we might look at current protests on any number of issues and say, well, they're not producing immediate change. Climate change is still a real crisis. So these folks are no Rosa Parks. Exactly. Exactly.

But I just want to say though, I assume you're not telling us we can't critique some of the methods that today is aspiring change makers might use because there are times when I watch young protesters and think amazing. And there are times where I think, I don't know. And is it never right to raise questions about certain protest tactics? No, absolutely. I mean, yes, I don't disagree with raising questions. That said, I think it's helpful for us to know what we're expecting to see, what we think effective change looks like. And if we think effective change looks like the Rosa Parks story, then I think our critiques

are just going to be not useful. Right. This fable is clouding our judgment of what's happening right now. All of the foregoing reminds me of something you said at the beginning of this discussion, which is about the sort of the danger of nostalgia's seduction and just remind me of our capacity to sugarcoat the past, whether we lived it or not, how every summer, at summer camp when I was a kid, the other kids would say, oh yeah, this summer is great, but it's not as good as last summer.

That's just something the mind seems to do. And this is yet another of these seven psychological tools that seems applicable well beyond the issue at hand, which is reckoning with history. Yeah, that's a really good point. I think that's right. To be able to understand that we have this tendency to sugarcoat the past to get sucked in by nostalgia to think everything was amazing in high school, for example,

or and to then devalue right now. But just on this nostalgia thing for a second, because it links to something else I wanted to ask you about, which is, you said something earlier, which is this, it's a cousin of nostalgia. It has to do with how we think about the past. We want things that happened a while ago to be wrapped up.

We don't want to deal with it anymore. You were saying. And I think that's true, not only of history, but also of, I don't know, family feuds or a fight you might have had with your wife or whatever it is. We just want to keep it moving. And, you know, I mentioned this to you when we were out socially the other night that I'm seeing a little bit of my own mind, but more in my audience and among my friends who are, most of my friends are like the type of people

who if you met them in the 90s, you would have considered them to be anointingly liberal, right? And even these people I'm finding are like, I'm just done. I'm just done with talking about this stuff. And I'm just wondering why do you think that is and how do we deal with it individually or collectively? Yeah, absolutely.

Well, I think the reason for it varies from person to person. I think sometimes it's feeling like the work is done. I think sometimes it's feeling like the work is never done. I think sometimes it's feeling like there's other things to worry about. Let's move on to the next thing. I think sometimes it's feeling like they don't agree with the way the issue is being approached. So I think I could see it coming from a range of places. So actually, I don't, Dan, I actually don't know if I've ever told you this. So my editor, my book editor,

had been asking me for a while to start a newsletter. And I had been resisting it. This is for at least a year back, like four years ago. And I just kept saying, I don't know, I don't know. What am I going to say? What am I going to say? You know, whatever. And then May 2020 happened. George Floyd was murdered. And we saw this sudden global activation on issues that are part of my daily life because of the work I do. And my inbox blew up and my phone is ringing and everyone wanted to talk. And suddenly I was like, I have something to say. I need everyone to calm down.

Even though I've been asking you all to pay attention for a really long time, I now need everyone to take a breath and think about the approach you're taking. And I decided, this is what my newsletter was going to start with, was the June 2020 issue would be the first one, and I would try to send this message. And what I wanted them to do is rather than try to do everything all at once at a thousand percent pace, I wanted them to take the Dan Harris approach of just 10%.

Like, can we do 10% more than we were before and allow compounding to sort of do its work over time? Because we'll sustain 10% in a more effective way. And so you have a little call out in my very first newsletter, I think, at the bottom. It sort of shouts you out for the 10% idea of the 10% more rule is if we're new to an issue, 10% more means

be 10% more mortified, mortified at what you're learning about the world around you or what you're learning about what's inside you. And that means stay in learning mode. You don't need to learn everything all at once, but 10% more than you did before. If you're familiar with an issue and you know, you've hashtagged or you've donated, you haven't been unaware of an issue, then 10% more means 10% more terrified. And here the idea is, can we take some more risks?

You know, if we are in a meeting and we hear something problematic, can we say something instead of just sort of going home and telling our roommate about it? So terrified is about putting more skin in the game. And then, finally, if we're exhausted, because we're fighting this fight every day, this is something that's maybe because of our lived identity or maybe because of sort of just the choices we've made

and what we focus on were very exhausted. 10% more might mean I'm gonna put in air quotes, satisfied air quotes. Not that the work is done or there's nothing left to do, but that you can take a break from it and maybe some of your friends need a break from it and then can come back in. So you're not like leaving the game,

you're just, you know, you're coming out, someone's going in and then you'll be back in the game soon. And this 10% more rule I have found for myself and for people I've talked to has really helped them engage in a more sustainable way that you don't have to know everything if you're new to the issue or risk everything if you're sort of trying to engage more with the issue or do everything if you do this to the issue or risk everything, if you're sort of trying to engage more with the issue, or do everything if you do this all the time,

you can simply focus on 10% more than you did before in a way that you can continue over time. I like that a lot, but just not let myself off the hook. I think what you just said sort of assumes the best. I also think it's possible that for me and for some of the people I've heard voice exhaustion, I'm not invalidating the exhaustion, but the people I'm hearing it from are all white, right? And so I'm wondering if, and I'm now going to invoke a very triggering term for people who struggle with political correctness, but I wonder if there's some fragility at play here as well.

That's fair. I think that's fair. So then the question to be asked in that feeling of exhaustion is how exhausted would I feel? Let's say I'm white and I'm exhausted. The question asked myself is how exhausted do I think I would feel if I was not white? If I was black, if I was brown and dealing with these issues, not just intellectually, but emotionally, practically, how exhausted would I feel? Yes. And to remember, some people can't take a break. No, right. No, exactly.

Exactly. And that's why the 10% more satisfied air quotes is meant specifically for people who can't take a break that even though you can't take a break, you don't have to fight the fight every day. You can't take a break from your lived experience and your lived identity, but you don't necessarily have to carry it on a collective level for everybody all the time. So this all leads us nicely, I think, to psychological total number six, which is take responsibility. Can you hold forth on that one? I think to psychological tool number six, which is take responsibility. Can you hold forth on that one?

Yes, this really builds off of work by Isabelle Wilkerson in her book Cast, where she offers the metaphor of an old house. You know, when we move into a house, and if we own that house, we accept that there's going to be stuff that's going to happen. There's going to be some unexpected leak in the basement. And we are going to be the ones that are going to have to deal with the leak in the basement, not because we caused the leak in the basement, but because we now own the house. And we benefit from the great sun.

It gets in the morning in the kitchen. And we benefit from the lovely neighbors. So we also have to own the things we don't like, like the leak in the basement. And this metaphor of the old house, I think captures sort of the mindset of taking responsibility. A lot of us wonder, well, like there's enough happening right now to deal with, why do I have to be responsible for things that happened 10 years ago, 50 years ago, 100 years ago, 500 years ago? Why is it my responsibility to even know about it, let alone do anything about it?

It's not my fault, it's not my responsibility. And I guess what I like about the old house metaphor is that it's not about the blame of who caused the leak. It's just about what are we blame of who caused the leak. It's just about what are we going to do about the leak. And the leak is going to affect us whether we take responsibility for it or not. Like it's happening in the basement. And you can choose never to go down to the basement and you're just going to pay for it later. It's just going to get worse. And so I think taking responsibility is about, can we think about our country and a collective,

this country that so many of us love, think about it in a collective way, that some of the difficult, complicated, like brutal parts of our history that are living in our present, that's the basement, and we gotta go in the basement. I've heard it argued before by some on the right. I do, by the way, spend quite a bit of time

listening to folks across the ideological spectrum. This one area where I'm not a complete hypocrite. And I've heard folks on the right make the case say, yeah, look, neither me nor my relatives had anything to do with slavery. But that seems to overlook the fact that you are living in a society where people who look like you benefit from the system that was set up and built on the backs of people who don't look like you. And that strikes me as it's not just enough to say, yeah, well, there's a leak we should fix it. I think you have to go a little step further to say, yeah, well, even if it's not your fault,

per se, you are benefiting from the inequities and inequities perpetuated centuries ago, or even just decades ago. I think that's right. And there's also like, if it wasn't you or your family that engaged in the institution of slavery, was it you and your family that was on the Mayflower, was it you and your family that was one of our forefathers? But we take a lot of pride in those things. Like we're willing to accept the pride part.

And it seems to me like if we're willing to accept that, if we're willing to do what psychologists Robo and Cheldini calls basking and reflected glory, when our favorite team wins and we feel good, we actually feel like we did something, we feel a sense of pride afterwards. There's an element of that and how we feel about the good things our country has done.

And so if we're gonna celebrate what happened 200 years ago, even though no one in our family was involved, it seems to me reasonable, even though it's not psychologically a sort of natural thing to do, it does seem like a reasonable thing to accept that we would be willing to consider the bad things as well. Final tool is building grit. Yeah. Okay.

So building grit is about what we do in so many parts of our lives. And so many parts of our lives, we show what Angela Duckworth, psychologist describes as passion and perseverance and pursuit of a meaningful long-term goal. That's what she calls grit in her best-selling book and her research and her TED

talk. And grit is something that makes us better at our jobs, you know, this year, then we were last year, maybe it makes us better parents, better partners, because we're willing to keep working at something. We're willing to, you know, keep going when things get hard. It's something that matters to us that we view as worth the passion and perseverance. The idea of grit is something we apply to so many other parts of our lives, but rarely to our relationship with our country. And this occurred to me when I was interviewing George DeKay, who many know from the original cast of Star Trek, who has remained remarkably relevant as a celebrity for the past 50 years, including now in his work as an activist,

trying to make people aware of what his family and 120,000 other Japanese Americans experienced in World War II, when due to an executive order by President Roosevelt, they were taken from their homes, forced to go to what were called internment camps that were basically incarceration. They were communities with barbed wire that they weren't allowed to leave,

soldiers with guns stopping them from leaving. And he, as a young boy around the age of four and his family as well as 120,000 other Japanese Americans, had not been accused of any crime. They were put in internment camps because they might commit a crime someday. And so this internment of Japanese Americans that his family experienced

that when they were finally released years later left his family jobless, homeless, they had lost everything. He spoke of this and it's become something really important to him that he make us aware of what's happened in our, again, not very long time ago, history. I interviewed him for my book, had the opportunity to speak to him on the phone. When he was speaking about the United States. It was with such love and such patriotism. And also speaking with the conviction of a man who will further rest of his life tell the story of what happened to his family at the hands of the government of the country he loves. So I'm like, again, paradox. I'm like,

I don't understand. Like, how is he speaking with such love of country and also such condemnation of what his country did to him, not in a subtle way, in a very overt way? You can tell by the emotion he expresses even now and I believe he's in his 80s, it's still, the emotion is still there from his childhood. And so as I was thinking about it, I realized that what I'm seeing in him is grit. I'm seeing that he doesn't expect there to be an easy love of country. He doesn't expect that he's entitled to love of country. He expects that he has to work for his love of country.

And he has to work to improve his country. And so this passion and perseverance and pursuit of a meaningful long-term goal makes him what I've been calling a gritty patriot. And my conclusion here, I was like, gosh, if he can still speak with such love of country, goodness knows the rest of us can. Like, it's just a matter of adopting

that mindset of gritty patriotism. You can love your country, war to know. Yes. And then take on the responsibility of working to make it better. Is there anything I should have asked but failed to ask? Oh, that's a good question, Dan Harris. I think I'll just end by saying, but I'm hearing from readers that makes me feel really good, is that my intention that they leave this book feeling hopeful and resilient and like there's a path forward that that's what they're receiving. You know,

this book is grounded in science and storytelling but it's also fueled by love of country and I wanted them to come away with that sense that they could feel hopeful and resilient in a path forward about their country's future and I think that's what many people are experiencing. a way with that sense that they could feel hopeful and resilient in a path forward about their country's future. And I think that's what many people are experiencing. I'm experiencing it. Oh, I'm so glad. I called that a win.

Before I let you go, can you please remind us again of the name of the book, the name of your newsletter, the name of the book you wrote before this book, anything you want to promote that we should be checking out? Absolutely. Well, first and foremost, 10% happier is a book by Dan Harris. You should all read it. The audio book is especially awesome. My website is dollychug.com. That's D-O-L-L-L-Y-C-H-U-G-H.com. My new book is called A Morgest Future. My first book was called The Person You Mean To Be. And both of those books are available wherever you buy books. And my free newsletter, if you'd like to start with something shorter and freer, is called Dear Good People. That's on my

website, dollichug.com. All the past issues are there for free as well, including the 10% more rule that we talked about from June 2020. And that's more of kind of a zeitgeisty. It's fun, but with a, you know, I sort of start fun, but usually end up landing on an actionable tip about how to be more inclusive. And it's just once a month in your inbox. Dali, thank you so much for doing this. Thrilled to be here.

Thank you, Dan, for all you do. Thanks again to Dali Chug. Thanks to you for listening. If you have time to go into your podcast player and give us a rating and or a review that would be really helpful. Only Texas second. 10% happier is produced by Gabrielle Zuckerman, DJ Cashmere, testing Davey, Lauren Smith and Tara Anderson. Our supervising producer is Marissa Schneiderman, and Kimmy Regler is our managing producer, scoring and mixing by Peter Bonnaventure of Ultraviolet Audio, and Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.

We'll see you all on Friday for a bonus. 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.