Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - Adam Grant on the Science of Potential and Achievement

Episode Date: October 25, 2023

One of our most frequent and popular guests talks about how to develop the character skills to discover your hidden potential.Adam Grant is an organizational psychologist at Wharton, where he has been the top-rated professor for seven straight years. His books have sold millions of copies, hisTED talks have been viewed more than 30 million times, and he hosts the hit podcastRe:Thinking. His viral piece on languishing was the most-read New York Times article of 2021. He has been recognized as one of the world's ten most influential management thinkers.In this episode we talk about:Why character skills are so important and how to develop themWhat we learn from seeking discomfortThe concept of scaffolding as a way to overcome obstaclesThe value of acceptable mistakesAnd How to see the hidden potential in others and champion themTake Adam’s Quiz: Which skill could unlock your potential?Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/tph/podcast-episode/adam-grant-hidden-potentialSee 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. Hello, everybody. It is a central question for any ambitious person. How do you reach your full potential? How do you achieve what you want to achieve? It's also a central question for any leader, or at least it ought to be, how do you make sure the people on your team reach their full potential? Today, we've got one of our most frequent and popular guests on this show. Adam Grant is an organizational psychologist and a professor at Wharton. He's written a whole string of bestselling books, including Give and Take, Think Again and

Originals. His latest is called Hidden Potential, the Science of Achieving Greater Things. This dude is prolific. In this conversation, we talk about why character skills, sometimes derided as soft skills, are so important and how to develop them. What we learn from seeking discomfort, why we should ask for advice rather than feedback, the concept of scaffolding as a way to overcome obstacles, the value of acceptable mistakes, how to use a rating system to gain better feedback and how to see the hidden potential in others, frankly a weak spot for me.

potential in others, frankly, a weak spot for me. Whether you're a new listener or a veteran listener, I want to remind you that this show has a companion meditation app, which is also called 10% happier. The app is a place you can go to practice what we talk about here on the podcast, and you can do it with meditations led by some of our most popular podcast guests, like Joseph Goldstein, Sharon Salverg, and many others. It's sort of like science class and college, the podcast is the lecture, and the app is the lab. Download the 10% happier app today, wherever you get your apps, and get started for free. If you've ever stayed at an Airbnb, you know that it can be a fun and affordable way to visit

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by joining Wondry Plus. Adam Grant, welcome back to the show. Thanks Dan, I am 10% happier now that I'm here. I love math jokes, as you know. And I, too, am 10% happier having you here. You're one of our most frequent guests and for a reason because I think you're awesome. And congratulations on your new book.

As I said, last time you were on the show, Adam Grant has done it again. You just keep adding to the conversation in a really helpful way. So let me just start by asking, how did you come to this subject? You've written about generosity, you've written about intellectual humility, now you're talking about hidden potential.

Why this? There's so many reasons why this. And I don't know which one's actually motivated me in the moment. But here's what I can tell you. Let me give you an actual answer, which is I think that most of us measure our success by how high we climb. And I've never found that those are the accomplishments that I'm the proudest of.

They might be the ones that impress other people the most. But the ones that have always mattered most to me are the ones where I started out with a lack of talent or opportunity. And I traveled a great distance against the odds. So I guess this has been a theme throughout my life. I was told that I would never make it as an athlete and ended up becoming a halfway decent springboard diver.

I was told that I didn't have the charisma or stage presence or confidence to command a classroom and ended up getting decent at teaching. And I was also told that I couldn't write and was actually recommended for a remedial writing class. And I was also told that I couldn't write and was actually recommended for a remedial writing class. And now I'm an author. And you know, it's not where I landed on any of those challenges that matters to me. It's the amount of progress that I made. And I guess Dan, a couple of things really struck me about those experiences as I reflected on them together. One,

if I had judged my potential by my starting abilities, I would have given up. I never would have stepped on a diving board. I never would have walked onto a stage. I never would have opened up a word document and started writing a first book, Let alone a six or seven. I think secondly, and maybe just as importantly, I think that most people think about potential in terms of performance when they should think about potential in terms of performance when they should think about it in terms of progress.

And I think everybody wants to realize their potential. And we have these biases toward focusing on, well, how natural is this skill for me? And how good is my performance in my early efforts that prevent us from realizing potential that's invisible to us and maybe to other people too. And I think that's a travesty. I think it is a, it's almost a tragedy to see human potential squandered. And so I really wrote this book to try to tackle that problem. Shorter answers failed.

No, I don't want shorter answers. I think that's perfect. I say this a lot on the show. My producers make fun of it, which is that I sometimes, often early in an interview, find myself having a thousand questions and trying to, like, doing a little buffering to figure out where am I going to go next. Let me just say this. There's a little bit of a line in the marketing materials for your book that struck me, which

is that this is a book for anybody who's felt overlooked and underrated. I don't know if I'm mangling the verbiage there, but that language doesn't seem like a throwaway to me. It feels like something you've felt about yourself. I think we all felt it. Well, as a diver, I felt underqualified because I couldn't touch my toes without bending my knees

and I could hardly jump. And I was not at all graceful. My teammates called me Frankenstein because I was so stiff when I walked. There I just felt underqualified and I was doubting my own abilities. When it came to teaching and writing, I felt like I was being underestimated by others

that I had some barriers that were preventing me from being good, but I also had a lot of motivation. And I felt like over time I could rise to the occasion some barriers that were preventing me from being good, but I also had a lot of motivation. And I felt like over time I could rise to the occasion and other people weren't seeing that potential. And so, yeah, I guess I wrote in potential for anybody who's ever felt like, I'm not up to this challenge or other people don't know what I'm capable of. Is there any tension between, like, I'm not up to this challenge, meaning I'm not sure

if I can achieve the goal that I'm setting out for myself. And what you said earlier about, let's not get overly focused on the achievement of a specific goal, but instead just meaningful progress. It may be just semantics, but I don't see a tension there. I think when people doubt themselves, when people feel like imposters, and they say, I'm not prepared for this, or I'm not qualified for this, what they're saying is, is not just, I can't perform, and I'm not going to live up to other people's expectations. They're also saying, I am not capable of learning in this area.

I can't become good enough. So it's not just, I'm not good enough today. It's, I'm never going to be good enough. Are there never cases just, I'm not good enough today. It's, I'm never gonna be good enough. Are there never cases where you should just really know your limits? I am never gonna play in the NBA and I feel pretty safe making that assertion. I feel completely comfortable endorsing that assertion.

You will never make the NBA dead. Ever. I wouldn't even nominate you for this celebrity team in the NBA, I'll start weekend. Yeah, of course we should all know our limits, but I think some of our limits are of our own making and I think that's unfortunate. So you know, let's let's take the sports example just to go with it So I had tons of limitations as an athlete You know after I got cut from the sixth grade basketball team and the seventh grade basketball team and the eighth grade basketball team,

it was finally clear that it was time to give up on basketball. That didn't mean I needed to give up on sports, though. I needed to find a sport where I had the potential to grow. And I found one in diving, even though I didn't have the physical attributes you normally look for in a diver, I had enough basic drive that I was able to overcome a lot of

those limitations. And so, yeah, I think we need to calibrate. But I think that in too many cases, you fail at one sport or you fall short in a couple. And then you overgeneralize and say, okay, well, I'm just not an athletic person. Right. Now that makes a lot of sense. So yeah, you should know your limits, but also don't kill your own dreams. It's maybe about like pivoting and being reasonable. If you've got a lot of passion around athletics, you can know you're not going to make the NBA, but also find a great pickleball team, for example. All right.

So, let's talk about how we can get better at what you're recommending here. The first part of your book is about the skills of character, sometimes referred to as soft skills, which you feel are being kind of pushed to the side, even with the name soft skills, it kind of makes it seem less important. Yeah, it's such a misnomer. So one of the things I did was I was curious about where the term soft skills came from in the first place. And it turns out it came out of the US Army

that was trying to classify skills that soldiers needed. And they took the label hard skills to mean anything where you work with metal. So soft skills were just, if you don't have a gun or a tank, and basically that's a soft skill. And so even finance, according to the military, would have counted's a soft skill. And so even finance, according to the military, would have counted as a soft skill.

And I think obviously that labeling was not helpful because it made soft skills sound weak. Even though at the time the army was very invested in, what are the intangible behavioral qualities that allow people to become great leaders and great team members? And I think ever since we've been undervaluing these soft skills, and as you know,

I'm particularly interested in character skills, which are the learn capacities that allow you to put your principles into practice. And I'm interested in those because there's a growing body of evidence that character skills actually be cognitive skills. So, you know, it's good to be smart. It's even more important to be dependable. So, you know, it's good to be smart. It's even more important to be

dependable, determined, and disciplined, and proactive, and pro-social. And these character skills are not just taught in kindergarten, they can actually be learned in adulthood. So, I think that we need a character revolution, and it's probably time for people to think about character less as a set of values, and more as a set of skills that can be built and honed and improved over time. And also to think of them not as things you should do because somebody on the mountaintop is telling you these are the virtues you should live out less to be damned to eternal hellfire. It's more about actually if you can master these character skills, you'll do better in life.

Yeah, that's what the research shows pretty clearly. So if you look at, I love this Raj Shetty study looking at kindergarteners and showing that you could predict what their income is going to be in their late 20s by knowing how experienced their kindergarten teachers were. So kids with more experienced kindergarten teachers were. So kids with more experience kindergarten teachers actually grow up to earn more money. They're also more likely to get into college and graduate. And I was just fascinated by this. I'm like, okay, kindergarten teachers matter a lot more than we realize. What's happening? You know, when you're five that sets you up for success when you're 25, and I assumed that the experienced kindergarten teachers

were gonna be great at teaching you math and reading and kind of setting you up then to be great at thinking. But that wasn't where the experienced kindergarten teachers gave kids the biggest edge. What really mattered was the set of character skills that you learned in kindergarten. So yes, an experienced kindergarten teacher did improve your math and verbal skills. But over the next couple of years,

kids who didn't benefit from that teacher would catch up. Where they didn't catch up was in the discipline and determination and the proactivity and the pro-social tendencies that these experienced kindergarten teachers were instilling in kids. And I think that that really goes to your point that learning to character skills allows you to achieve your goals. And this is not just something you should do because you're aspiring to be a moral person. It's also part of how we accomplish our objectives and make progress in areas that really matter

to us. These character skills, in my experience, and for what I understand from looking at the data, will not only help you achieve your goals professionally, but also will make you happier because they will improve the quality of your relationships and that's the most important variable in human flourishing. Yeah, I don't know a lot of people who,

if you look at their dating profiles, like my dream is to marry someone who is completely undisciplined, has no determination is passive and also doesn't care about other humans. Yeah, perhaps Bianca Harris would have been the exception to that rule, but yes. No, absolutely, absolutely.

People want these qualities in a romantic partner, they want these qualities in a colleague and also having these qualities in a romantic partner, they want these qualities in a colleague, and also having these qualities will allow you to deal with the inevitable ups and downs with any relationship and any aspect of your life. I always think about that Harvard study, Robert Waldinger's work around multi-generational study of people in Boston and what's the thing that leads to happiness and longevity. It's the quality of their relationships. What I'm trying to do is to put a top spin of self-interest on things like virtues, which

are often sold to us as vegetables. That's a great way to frame it. I do think at some level though that we don't always need the Trojan horse. So yes, if I can smuggle virtue in a package of, this is actually gonna allow you to get the results you want, sure. But I also think that people are intrinsically motivated by a sense of growth and progress. We all get joy out of feeling like we're moving forward. And so I think the other argument that I would make is, the evidence is clear and consistent

that if you like to get better, then investing in character skills might be the most enjoyable and worthwhile investment you can make in the long run. And so you say these are more important than cognitive skills, but how much more important because if I'm going to go into any field, being smart, especially if I'm in the STEM fields, having technical ability and say math, seems like really important. Obviously, it won't make a difference if I'm completely disorganized and a jerk and have no determination, but it seems like you can't just be all about character and have no cognitive ability.

Yeah, I don't think it's either or. I think what I'm trying to highlight here is that we live in a world that is obsessed with cognitive skills. And we really underappreciate the importance of character skills. And in some of the evidence, character skills are two to three times more influential than cognitive skills when it comes to actually looking at how close people come to achieving their potential. So there was a great experiment done a few years ago with entrepreneurs in Africa and they randomly assigned either to learn cognitive skills or character skills. So in the cognitive skills training, they get to learn how to do finance and marketing and sales and accounting and basically pick up

the essential business knowledge that they need to run a company. In the character skills training condition, the entrepreneurs are taught, okay, here's how to think about when you run into an obstacle, how to overcome it and anticipate that obstacle and maybe even be proactive enough to prevent it. Here's how to persist when you feel like you're failing. And they're given a chance to think about and practice applying these skills to different entrepreneurial dilemmas.

When you track them over the next two years, you see that the growth rates in terms of financial results think about profits, for example, of the entrepreneurs who have taught character skills just for a week are about triple. The growth rates, of the entrepreneurs who were taught character skills just for a week are about triple the growth rates financially of the entrepreneurs who are taught the cognitive skills of business. And I think to a lot of people, this is extremely counterintuitive because what could be more important for running and growing a business than learning business skills?

And yet what we see here is that ultimately the entrepreneurs who are able to exceed expectations are really the ones who master the capability to confront the unknown and then basically create something that's going to succeed when the world around them is constantly influx and difficult to predict. And that is much more a matter of character skills than it is about just being a good thinker. Coming up Adam Grant talks about how we can learn to develop our character skills, the value of acceptable mistakes, and how to use a rating system to get better feedback. I'm Rob Briden, and welcome to my podcast, Briden and we are now in our third series.

Among those still to come is some Michael Pailin, the comedy duo Egg and Robbie Williams. The list goes on so do sit back and enjoy Briden hand on Amazon music, Wondery Plus or wherever you get your podcasts. MUSIC Hello, I'm Hannah. And I'm Suryte. And we are the hosts of a Red Handed A Weekly True Crime Podcast. Every week on Red Handed, we yet stuck into the most talked about cases.

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Okay, so I think you've convinced everybody that character skills are really important and you've also made the point that if you're kindergarten teacher sucked, it's not too late to learn them now. So how do we learn them? Well, I think we wanna start by asking which ones are most important to learn?

And I think for kindergartners, basic discipline determination, being proactive in pro-social, those kindergarten skills are kind of table stakes. What I was curious about is, which ones do we need to keep building in order to continue growing throughout our lives? And I found that there are basically three skills

that show up again and again, as important for helping us realize our hidden potential. And I've come to think about them as being a discomfort seeker, a sponge, and an imperfectionist. So let's start with discomfort seeking. Basically, the message here is that in the short run, many people like to avoid discomfort. And in the long run, that stunts their growth.

Because they're only playing to their strengths, they're not overcoming their weaknesses, and they're failing to continue stretching themselves. And I think here, Dan, this is where I want to get your perspective a little bit, because when I think about discomfort seeking, I think a lot about exposure therapy. And I saw, opposed to you did recently,

about your forays into exposure therapy. So I saw, opposed to you did recently, about your forays into exposure therapy. So I'd love to hear more. Yeah, I mean, I've talked about this in the show, so I'll keep it reasonably brief, but I've dealt with panic for a long time, and I had a resurgence of panic a couple months ago, actually a year ago, and I was having trouble on elevators and airplanes, and went and did a lot of exposure therapy where you are consistently, but gently exposing yourself to the shit that scares the shit out of you.

And I found it to be incredibly helpful. I had to take a bunch of elevators today because I'm staying at a hotel in New York City had to go up and down and then up and down in this studio where I'm filming this with you. And yeah, I don't love it, but I'm able to do it. I took a red eye last night, which involved, of course, getting on a plane.

And I had a little moment of, I don't want to do this as I was stepping onto it, but yeah, it sucks to do, to expose yourself to what's uncomfortable. And it's liberating to know that if you do it in the right way, your whole world can expand. So there are two different approaches to exposure therapy that I'm familiar with. There's the systematic desensitization approach where you start very small.

You draw a picture of an elevator and then you go and look at an elevator and then you get in one that's not moving and you keep the door open and you're slowly warming yourself up and decreasing your discomfort. The flooding approach is we're going to just blindfold you, put you in an elevator to the top of the tallest building in the world and hope you get over it. Where do you stand on the relative efficacy of those two approaches? Because I feel like the evidence is mixed. Well, I don't know what the evidence is. I can just tell you, for me, I gravitate very strongly toward the incremental approach.

And I've just seen it work in my own end of one experience over and over. But I don't know, what is the evidence show? I mean, I've seen lots of research suggesting that both can be effective. I imagine that there are going to be people who work better under one or another. And what's interesting to me about it is that I feel like I've benefited more from flooding over the years. That instead of dipping my toe in the shallow end, just being thrown into the deep end is what, for me,

it accelerates the process of saying, you know what? What's the worst that could happen? It already happened. So I felt this way with public speaking. I felt like I remember starting grad school and consistently, like if I thought about talking in a seminar, I would start to physically shake in my heart would race. And I would feel like I'm going to embarrass myself and everyone's going to think I'm an idiot and I'm going to stumble over my words. And then by the time I finally worked up the courage to raise my hand, all those things would happen

because I was actually distracted managing my anxiety and I couldn't put a coherent thought together. And I felt like, you know, just kind of working my way up to making one comment in a seminar was not enough to really, I guess it didn't accelerate my discomfort enough or amplify my discomfort enough to get me used to it. And so what I ended up doing was just, I started volunteering to give guest lectures in my friends' classes. Like, okay, if I can stand up in front of a group of strangers

and talk to them for an hour, part scripted, part unscripted Q&A, that's gonna force me to get comfortable with such an extreme level of this, that just speaking up and making a couple of comments in a seminar is gonna be a walk in the park. And I found that much more effective than the, all right, I'm gonna do little pieces

because I felt like I was always working towards something and never really getting over it. That makes a lot of sense. And I suspect that you're right when you say it's individual. I wonder if one variable here is, if you have a like a genuine panic disorder. So for me, you know, these panic attacks, they're not gonna kill me,

but it really does feel like I'm dying. And there's some trauma in that. And, and I don't know if I'm using the term trauma with technical accuracy, but there have been many times in my life where I've gotten in over my head and it's been incredible, an incredible learning experience. But there wasn't the X factor of, am I going to have a physiological response that is going to be crippling? And so I wonder if you take that out of the equation, does that make flooding a little bit more sensible? Yeah, that resonates for me intuitively.

I think, yeah, the fact that I'm dealing with normal anxiety when it comes to public speaking means that flooding is probably not gonna be too unpleasant. Whereas if you're experiencing a disorder or an extreme physiological response, flooding sounds not only unpleasant, it sounds counterproductive. Yes, yeah, that makes sense. I wonder if you're emphasis in this book on getting comfortable with discomfort and I apologize if this is an inappropriate connection I'm making here, but I know you're

familiar with Jonathan Hyde, the social psychologist from NYU, and he has come on this show, and many other shows to argue that we have like a younger generation that is very resistant to ideas they don't like, and his argument is, actually, no, no, it is intellectual strength. Maybe this draws on your last book, too, we can think again. It is intellectual strength to earnestly wrestle with ideas that make you uncomfortable and maybe even that you find abhorrent. Yeah, this is actually the bridge from thinking into hidden potential in many ways that avoiding ideas that make you uncomfortable.

It thwarts your ability to learn to be a critical thinker. You have to wrestle with uncomfortable ideas to improve your critical thinking skills because by definition, if you're avoiding uncomfortable ideas, then you're actually not allowing your own assumptions and views to be tested and challenged and refined and evolved over time. And I think that's a huge problem.

I think that seeking discomfort, though, is about much more than just confronting unpleasant or unwanted thoughts. It's also putting yourself in situations where you are likely to fail, where you might be judged negatively, where you might even embarrass yourself. And I guess the example that I was really struck by as I was doing research on this is learning styles. So a lot of people gravitate toward a particular style

of learning. We might have a bunch of people listening to us today because they think they're auditory learners. And they've always gravitated toward consuming information by listening. Others have been told they're verbal learners. And they learn best by reading. Maybe some people think of themselves as

kinesthetic learners who like to learn by doing. And if you look at the research on these learning styles, we have now several decades of evidence in psychology suggesting that these are meaningless when it comes to learning. So you don't get me wrong, Dan. You may have a preference. You may like learning a certain way, but you do not actually learn better according to your supposed style. And in fact, sometimes you learn worse because it comes too fluidly. Sometimes learning in a domain that is uncomfortable for you forces you to concentrate more. It stretches your mind more and you end up growing more because of it. And so I think that part of seeking discomfort is saying, I don't need to just engage with things that maybe

I'm not drawn to or attracted to from a content perspective, but also from a process perspective. Like, let me get out of my comfort zone in the way that I like to learn, in the skills that I think I have. So, you know, if you're an audiobook person, there's a strong case to be made that you may learn more actually by reading a physical book. Research shows that people actually absorb more when they're reading them when they're listening. That they end up also engaging in more critical thinking because they're more likely to go back over the text as opposed to rewinding and pausing an audiobook or a podcast. And they're more visual cues that allow you to do that in text as well. And I don't think we do that enough. I think we get into a rhythm and a comfort zone,

and we stop stretching ourselves, and we should all be mixing up our modalities to try to, I guess, to embrace and engage with ideas and perspectives through multiple media. That makes a lot of sense. Just to reset, I asked you, what do we do to build character skills, and you listed three strategies.

One was discomfort, the other was imperfectionism, and then the third was something else that I've forgotten. Being a sponge. Okay, being a sponge, sorry that I'm going to chalk up to forgetting to the aforementioned red eye. So where should we go next? Imperfection or spunginess? Let's go to imperfectionism next, because I think it's a natural sequel in some ways to

seeking discomfort. So, one of the things that happens when you seek discomfort is you will make a lot of mistakes. And I found over time that the people who end up growing the most are the ones who are able to tell the difference between an acceptable mistake and an unacceptable mistake. They're the people who know how to strike a balance between when I need to strive for excellence and when it's okay to say,

this is good enough. And I think that's a difficult skill. So I will say discomfort seeking is probably my strongest character skill. I created a quiz and of course had to make myself into a guinea pig as part of the assessment. I was surprised actually that of course had to make myself into a guinea pig as part of the assessment and I was surprised actually that I scored highest on discomfort seeking. Apparently, I just crave being uncomfortable in many situations. And despite my best efforts and us talking about this in a previous conversation, my lowest score was on being an imperfectionist, it eats away at me when I give a speech and I missed a line.

The audience doesn't know. I'm the only one who knows, but I still feel like it was imperfect and I screwed it up, even though it might have been above an audience member's expectations, or it might have met their expectation. I wasn't quite happy with it. It didn't go exactly the way that I wanted and I beat myself up for that. And what happens is then instead of sort of thinking about, all right, how could I give a better talk next time? I'm ruminating about the past

and then the next time I get on stage, I'm laser focused in tunnel vision and I'm making sure I cover that one line and I've missed the 19 other things that I could have done better on a broader scale. And so I think that's a scale that probably a lot of people struggle with, like I do. How about you, Dan?

Where are you on the perfectionism spectrum? Well, I was just thinking as you were talking, I don't struggle with, like, if I miss a line, you know, I go into a spiral about that. That's not really my bugaboo, but I do wonder about the line between good enough and room for improvement in like big project. So I'm writing a book as I talk about and wind about all the time.

And you know, I had a publishable draft 14, 15, 16 months ago. But I got some notes that suggested, hey, there are some pretty significant areas for improvement. And I've been diligently, doggedly rewriting on the logic that, right, right, slowly and my right memoirs takes a long time to like live the story out and to have the learning sink. And if I have this shot to write a book about love,

which is what the book's about, I want it to be awesome. So one could say, well, Dan, you're being a perfectionist, you're taking it too far. Maybe that's true, but on the other hand, I think, no, I actually think there's significant room for improvement here, and it's worth my time not to rush through this. Yeah, okay, so this is where I think this gets interesting. The fine line between being an imperfectionist and a perfectionist, the danger of your approach is that the book will never be done

because you could keep sending it out for comments and anyone who reads it is going to see areas for improvement. So where do you set that bar? How do you know when it's reached an acceptable standard of excellence? I think that's a problem. Wait a minute, that's why, how long have you been working on this book now? Six years? You were working on this book when we first met.

Yes, I was. That was before the pandemic. It's been a while. Yeah, it's been a long time. Part of it is that it's a longitudinal memoir. So major events happen that make it a good story. It's not, you know, you write narrative, spangled arguments. And I write, that's a great phrase. Pull on narratives that add up to an argument, but it's not expository. Like it's really

that add up to an argument, but it's not expository. Like, it's really narrative. And there are expository sections. So, it really means that the movie has to have the right acts, the right story beats. And that takes time in living. And you don't want to force developments that aren't there. And if I'm going to learn something genuinely life-changing for me and hopefully for you as the reader,

that doesn't happen on a schedule. No, it doesn't. And by the way, I wouldn't want to rush you because I love the quality that you produce. It does seem like you're at the point where you're a little bit agitated, maybe a little frustrated that is not done yet. And there's a voice in your head that wants to keep refining it. in your head that wants to keep refining it. And I mean, from knowing you for a while, I would guess that some of that stems from social anxiety and worrying that, you know, there's a blind spot or major flaw that you've missed and that the book's going to get crucified and you're going to embarrass yourself or ruin your career or something like that.

How far off am I? Not far off at all. We don't live in the, you know, congenial times from a public dialogue perspective. So there is that for sure. But really more, I think right now, it's more about, I think that I can improve the quality of the storytelling in a way that will allow the learnings to land

with people seamlessly. I don't want you to feel like you're learning much. Actually, I want you to feel like you're on a ride. It's hilarious. It's embarrassing for the person who's telling the story. And at the end of the day, you do learn something, but it's a little bit smuggled in to use the phrase you used earlier. So what you're hearing for me, really, I think the tension right now is, and I may get

to a point where I'm being overly personinnickety in asking for too many comments. But right now, actually, I think the tension in my voice is giving myself permission to do this safely while juggling all the other balls that I've got in the air, doing this podcast and lots of other things that I do. But working on the book in a stately, sanely way and knowing that I will put it out when it's ready. Sweetie, you did it. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha that you spoke about in your TED Talk. I think that there's a part of me that wonders though if there's not another role that other people can play it because I think with any kind of creative work, the challenge is that we're often too close to it, to judge quality.

Yes. And this is actually something I took away from my diving days. You could come out of the water and try to judge your own dive. And most of the time, you would completely miss the mark because you couldn't see it. You were busy flipping and twisting and your perspective is skewed

and you're also, you're in the dive instead of having an outside view. So we would rely on judges and coaches to tell us what was working and how to make it better. And I found myself doing the same thing as a writer and in frankly, and everything else I care about, which is I take a few people who's taste I trust and I ask them, can you rate this on a scale from zero to 10?

And the key for me is, and this is something that I need to be more disciplined about this, in the areas where I'm too perfectionistic, the more important the project is, the higher the target. So if I were writing an op-ed, I might say I'm aiming for a seven. But a book is a huge project, and so my target is a nine. And when I give a draft to a bunch of people, and I ask them, you know, what's your, you know, zero to ten, honest rating, and a bunch of people come back with fours, and I know I need to start over from scratch. If I get a bunch of, you know, of seven and a halfs and eights, I know I'm doing more tweaking. And I think that kind of calibration

is enormously helpful. So, you know, I think asking for comments is one thing. I think asking for a rating, when you ask somebody for a zero to 10, nobody ever says 10. But then they help you gauge, are you in the ballpark? Or, you know, are you actually way off the mark?

Have you tried anything like that yet? Have you gotten a bunch of nines? And if so, is it time to wrap up? No, I think that's great because I have not asking for number ratings. I'm asking for qualitative comments. And I would put it around the six or seven range in the last draft.

But yes, I think if I put it out for comments next time and I ask for ratings and they come back in the seven or seven range in the last draft. But yes, I think if I put it out for comments next time and I asked for ratings and they come back in the seven or eight range that I should tell myself, okay, we're close enough that we're not gonna be freaking out about sentence structure for 12 more months. Yeah, that's right. And I think there are a few things that I really like about the rating system.

One is that the precision helps you calibrate, am I making major changes or minor changes? Is this pretty close? There's this far away. But, too, it also helps the people that you're asking for input. I took calibrate a little bit because a lot of times people read something and they're really bothered by a story you told on page 174. And that's looming very large in their minds, but it doesn't really matter. a story you told on page 174. And that's looming very large in their minds,

but it doesn't really matter. And so asking them for a rating of the whole thing allows them to zoom out and say, okay, yeah, there's that one thing that really bugged me, but is that gonna tank the entire book probably not? And so I think it helps them see the forest in the trees as well as you. This has been very helpful and it does link to something else you talk about in the book,

which is it's better to ask for advice than feedback. What do you mean by that? Well, okay, so this is the skill of being a sponge. So I actually spent a couple of weeks reading about the properties of sea sponges. I learned that they're not just great at absorbing nutrients. They're also finely tuned at expelling what might be harmful chemicals. And I think that we think about sponges just as having absorbative capacity, but they're also great at filtering. And I think we all need to develop the capacity to filter. So the problem when you ask for feedback

is you don't get a very good filter. People tell you what you did wrong in the past, and it might be an endless list. When you ask for advice, what research shows is you tend to get more constructive suggestions about what you can change next time that will move the needle. And so it starts to weed out some of the irrelevant things to get more constructive suggestions about what you can change next time that will move the needle. And so it starts to weed out some of the irrelevant things and some of the things you don't

have a lot of control over, advice is very much targeted toward, well, what can I control? What can I adjust? What can I change? And so it allows you really to concentrate on the things that matter that are also actionable. And so this is something I found helpful when I do get into that mode of beating myself up for, you know, I didn't land that one point I wanted to hit in a 45 minute presentation. If I ask people, you know, give me feedback, I hear a lot of things that I don't have a lot of clarity about which ones are important and which ones aren't.

Which ones can I, you know, can I really work on and which ones are sort of out of my hands? When I say, what advice do you have for my next talk? What's one thing I can do better? I'm getting much more targeted feedback. It's not even feedback. I'm getting much more targeted suggestions. And then to further improve the filtering, what I'll do is I ask a bunch of people independently.

So I think a lot of people are afraid of feedback. They go to one person, they get crushed, and it's over. I can't do this anymore, it's too painful. And my advice to those people is actually you ask for too little. Because if you go and ask six or seven people, what's the one thing I can do better? A bunch of those comments are going to turn out to be a deocene critic to one person's taste. There are going to be a couple of common comments are going to turn out to be idiosyncratic to one person's tastes.

There are going to be a couple of common threats that show up across four or five people, and those are not opinions, right? Those are quality control issues. And so that allows you to really filter and focus in on the things that bothered everybody, as opposed to just the one person you happen to know the best or go to first. So, I think my advice seeking guidance here is to pick five, six, seven people where you can, who might be able to give you a quick tip and then see where they converge independently and that's where you want to focus your energy. So, it's about getting the right sample size that allows you to kind of see where signal is instead of noise. Exactly.

That was what I should have said. Yes. Well put, Dan Harris. Coming up at him talks about the concept of scaffolding as a way to overcome obstacles, how systems of opportunity impact everybody's ability to achieve and how to see hidden potential in the people around you. Bosch Legacy returns now streaming. Maddie's been taken. Oh God. His daughter. Maddie! He's in the hands of a madman.

What are the police have been looking for me? But nothing can stop a father. And we want to find her just as much as you do. I doubt that very much. From doing what the law can't. And we have to do this the very way. You have to. I don't.

Bosch Legacy. Watch the new season, now streaming exclusively on Freevy. Emily, do you remember when one direction called it a day? I think you'll find there are still many people who can't talk about it. Well luckily, we can. A lot. Because our new season of Terribly Famous is all about the first One Directioner to go it alone.

Zayn Malik. We'll take you on Zayn's journey from Shilad from Bradford to being in the world's biggest boy band and explore why, when he reached the top, he decided to walk away. Follow terribly famous wherever you get your podcasts. I had a great boss. We're still very good friends. I'm actually having dinner with her tomorrow night.

Her name is Amy Antelas. She's one of the big honchos at CNN. She hired me at ABC News a million years ago. And we would sometimes sit and look at tape of my anchoring. And she had a great way of, instead of giving me devastating feedback of like, ah, you see a immature or I don't like you, she would give me very actionable feedback. For example, don't talk too much with your hands, which I'm doing right now. And it would give me very actionable feedback. For example, don't talk too much with your hands, which I'm doing right now.

And it would give me a sense of agency. Oh, this is a very specific thing I can work on. Now, clearly I wasn't doing a good job with the sample size, because it was just Amy I was talking to. But she was giving advice instead of like meas-matic feedback that there was nothing I could do about. Does that make sense? It does. And what it highlights for me is she was a coach as opposed to just being a critic or a cheerleader

So I think most of us are Surrounded by cheerleaders and critics. Right a cheerleader is somebody basically who celebrates your best self a critic is somebody who attacks your worst self a coach is somebody who helps you become a better version of yourself. And I think that that's fundamentally about giving advice as opposed to just feedback. I think that one of the things we don't realize about coaches though is that we're not dependent on them in the way that we often think.

So I guess this is really the second part of hidden potential. So the first part is about the character skills. And it is extremely helpful if you want to keep growing to embrace discomfort, to be a sponge, to accept imperfections. But that doesn't happen in a vacuum. And over time, in order to keep building character skills, what we need is not permanent support from other people.

What we need is more temporary scaffolding. There's a lot of research on scaffolding and learning that basically shows that just like in constructing a building, you don't need to put up a permanent structure that allows a crew to climb. You just need temporary supports that allow them to scale a new height. And then when they've reached that height,

they can remove the scaffolding. A lot of coaching works the same way. So, you know, it's sort of the opposite of the the psychodynamic therapist who says, all right, Dan, it's great to meet you. You're going to spend the next 25 years on my couch. And I hope that, you know, one day you will have eventually overcome some of the challenges that you're facing right now or gain a new perspective. Scaffolding is much more a coach parachutes in, gives you a few tips. You're able to, you know, to overcome the obstacle that's in front of you, and then you're no longer reliant on that person, either because you've internalized the skills that they had to share with you, and now you can imagine what they would say,

or because you've actually overcome the deficit. And so their expertise is no longer needed. And I think it's a liberating way to think about coaching, to say, okay, I don't need, you know, not just, this isn't just relevant to therapy. This is relevant to mentoring, right? I don't need one mentor who's going to guide me for the next five years. I need to meet somebody who's got a perspective that can help me cross a bridge.

And then once I'm past it, guess what? I don't necessarily need them as guide anymore. This makes a lot of sense, by the way, that instead of one person, one rabbi, one therapist, one priest who you just go to forever and you're stuck in that vortex, that we need our transient temporary structures that help us with transient temporary structures that help us with transient

temporary problems and allow us to build. That doesn't mean you can't have one person that you're going to consistently, but you don't want to be a captive. So how do you find these people? I imagine a lot of people listening or thinking, you know, how do I find my scaffolds? Well, I think what most people do is they look to the the best expert and they say, okay, I want to I want to find the person who's most knowledgeable or most skilled. But the evidence points, I think, in a different direction. Oftentimes, the person who's most expert is the worst person

to teach coach or advise you. Because they're too far from where you are to remember what it's like to be in your shoes. A more effective guide is frequently someone who's one or two steps ahead of you, who can walk you through, here are some possible routes, who can point you toward some stumbling blocks that might be ahead of you on the path and really relate to the perspective that you're taking. So I would definitely look toward those people who are kind of near you on the journey. And then the other, I think, factor that you want to consider is how much do they love teaching and sharing their knowledge?

Because chances are that they're not going to be able to walk you through their exact path. They're not you, right? You have different skills, you have different strengths, you have different weaknesses to work on. And so some of the directions they give you are just not going to apply. And that means you want people who have the patience and the commitment to keep bouncing ideas back and forth so that you can iterate with them and find directions that are going to work for you. There does seem to be some socioeconomic aspects to this, and I know your book doesn't shy away from these issues,

that you're going to have more access to better mentors if you're coming from a position of advantage. Oh, yeah, definitely. I mean, this is the third part of the book, looking at how we can change systems of opportunity. And yeah, I think the chatty and others evidence here is chilling. We all know that opportunity is important, but the idea that if I grow up in a wealthier area that I'm about 10 times as likely to become an inventor, for example, just because I have access to people who are doing that and the door is open for me, I wouldn't have expected the effect to be quite as dramatic as it is in a bunch of the evidence. And I think that there's good news and bad news on this front. The bad news is a lot of people are denied opportunity.

And that's just unfair. I think the good news is that we have more access to it than we ever did before. I think the internet has democratized knowledge in a lot of ways. You know, whether we're talking about Khan Academy or Wikipedia, one of my favorite people that I met while I was researching this book, Dan was Julius Yego, who grew up in Kenya and Julius's dream was to follow in the footsteps of his country's great distance runners. And he shows up for his school's, I think it was a 10k race and the winner laps him and soda's second place.

He realizes, okay, running, not my cup of tea. So, you know, he could quit sports, but he doesn't. You know, he plays soccer, that doesn't pen out for him. And then eventually he ends up trying the javelin because he and his brother had enjoyed, you know, sharpening sticks and throwing them in the bush. And Julius does not have access to any of the opportunity that he should.

He doesn't have an elite javelin. He doesn't have the right running spikes. He doesn't have a gym that can make him strong. He doesn't even have a coach. And yet Julius ends up becoming the gold medalist at the All Africa Games. And he goes on to win an Olympic medal. I don't think anybody from Africa has ever even meddled in the sport before.

So how does Julius do it? When he was asked who his coach was, he said, YouTube. He went to an internet cafe. He watched great Javlin throwers. He emulated their techniques. And that was enough to close a lot of the gap. Now if you watch him, his form is still pretty unconventional. Even in some big meets, he falls flat on his face and almost looks like he looks like he's about to do the worm as he lands. But he found a way to make it work for him. And with very little coaching and training and opportunity, he was able to substitute

and basically sort of take YouTube as his own scaffolding and become his own coach. And so, you know, I think that the Julia Ciego is the exception and I would love to live in a world where he's the rule where everybody is able to do that, where you don't have to rely on your own initiative and proactivity, your own capacity to be a sponge, to close that gap.

And I think we have a lot of work to do to build those systems and I try to cover a number of ways that schools and teams and communities and workplaces can do that in the book. But I do think it gives me hope to see examples like that that there are more of those opportunities today than there were a decade ago or a century ago. Yes, I think there are many reasons to believe we're heading in the right direction.

And there are some pretty daunting obstacles. It seems to me to Creating a level of equality of opportunity that we would like to see and that live up to our fundamental ideals I would agree wholeheartedly with that and you know, I think that Schools are probably a good place to start here I mean, there's a lot that schools can do to create more opportunity, but one of the things I've learned from the research on on high-achieving schools is that they're not as stratified as American schools are.

They're not obsessed with gifted and talented programs. They believe that every teacher's job is to bring out the potential in every student. And there's been a lot of debate and controversy about growth mindset lately. There's some research suggesting that maybe teaching it is harder than we think and stilling it is harder than we think. But one of the things that we do know

from the research is that growth mindset matters more where students lack opportunity. So with underprivileged students, with underrepresented students, teaching growth mindset becomes more important. And we also know that it's not enough to instill that mindset in the head of kids. We also need their teachers to hold it.

So that their teachers see the potential in them, as opposed to just them saying, well, I think I have potential, but nobody else here believes it, so it must not be true, or I'm never gonna get a shot. And that means we need to build cultures in schools that give every student a chance to excel.

And there are a lot of ways to do that. I'm struck, for example, that in Finland where disadvantaged students excel at much higher rates than most countries in the world, there is a student support team at every school in Finland. And what that means is it's not just on your teacher to make sure that you're getting a chance. There's also a counselor and the school principal who sit down and review your progress and then make sure that you have the support you need if you're not growing in a

particular area. And how amazing it would be if every school on the planet offered that kind of support. Can you go back to growth mindset? What, you just define that for people who aren't familiar with it? Sure, so as Carol Dwack originally defined it, growth mindset is believing that abilities are not fixed. They're flexible, they can be learned and improved over time.

And what's the controversy? The controversy is there've been some new meta-analysis studies of studies suggesting that when you do an intervention where you try to teach kids growth mindset, it doesn't dramatically change their achievement, and that the effects are larger in experiments done by researchers who have something to gain. Like, for example, if they've written a book about Kruthmiteset, or if they've given a lot of talks on it, or they've published a lot of research on it. And I would say, mostly an observer to these debates,

I would say a couple of things. Number one, effect sizes are generally small in educational interventions. And they're especially small when you're looking at a downstream outcome like student's grades. So you're assuming that, number one, you know, a one shot intervention

that for half an hour teaches you that you can learn and grow in areas where you think you might have low ability or low talent. We're assuming that that's going to have a lasting impact on your mindset over the course of a year as a student, maybe longer, that doesn't always hold. Then we're assuming that that mindset is going to translate into a bunch of effort and persistence and proactivity, which may or may not happen. And then we're going to assume that those behaviors, in turn, are going to improve your grades, and that you have the tools and the resources you need to translate those behaviors into more learning and more mastery, which again is an open question.

So I wouldn't expect the effects to be large. I also think that it's reasonable to assume that researchers who believe in this concept are more motivated to report supportive evidence and that's a bias. But that also in some cases, they work harder to produce an effective intervention and that's something we might want to learn from. So, you know, I think that growth mindset matters. It may not matter as much as many people think, but it does matter in contexts where students are often deprived and people think, but it does matter in context where students are often deprived. And it's not just something that we can put in your head. We have to give you the resources and the opportunity structures to grow, not just a belief that growth is possible. I'm going to make the assumption that many, if not most of the people listening to this

show are relatively advantaged or privileged. So what can we do to see the hidden potential and the folks around us who may not have had all the advantages we've had, whether it's in the workplace or parenting volunteer work, friendships, how do we do our little bit to ensure equality of opportunity? Well, I think across domains, the most important thing I would say is we want to look at trajectories of progress, not initial abilities. So, I think instead of asking, is my kid a prodigy or is my kid a natural? We should look at how much has my kid improved over the course of the past few months or

over the last year. And what that often does is it shifts our attention away from the raw talent factors that loom large early and toward the character skills that produce momentum and improvement over time. I think that, you know, in the workplace, if we want to make this sort of specific and actionable, the mistake that too many managers make is they treat past experience and past performance as proxies for future potential. And they're not good proxies at all. Experience is a terrible predictor for performance.

It's almost useless. So if we don't know whether you've actually had 20 years of experience or whether you've had the same year of experience 20 times, And in most jobs, it actually has no predictive power for looking at how well you're going to learn the job. And past performance seems better, but you may not have experience in a job that's relevant. And so your ability to do one skill may have no bearing on your ability to gain another skill.

And also, past performance is often focusing on your initial talent as opposed to the character skills you have to improve every time. So one way we can get closer to future potential is to give you a chance to do a do-over. There's a call center in Israel called Call You Call that does this beautifully. They actually hire mostly individuals with disabilities, but all kinds of underdogs. And they bring you in for your first interview and they give you challenges that are similar to the job. So if you have to deal with a difficult customer problem,

for example, one of their exercises, I really love, but they ask you to try to convince a teenage or not to bring their phone to the dinner table. Saying, all right, instead of putting you in a call center situation that you may not have learned yet, let's give people a scenario that they're all familiar with and see how well they handle that. And then you do the role play. At the end, they ask you how you think it went. And if you don't like how you performed, they give you a chance to do a do-over. It's a mulligan. And then in round two, they can not only look at how good you were at round two, but how

much did you improve from round one, which is a great sign of your ability to learn and your motivation to learn over time? I think it would be amazing if every job interview included a do-over. But how do we integrate that into our hiring processes now? Like it could be hiring somebody at work or hiring somebody to do work around your house or whatever, if we're not going to go by past experience, do we just build do overs into every opportunity worth contemplating, conferring on people?

Well, I think the, maybe the easier starting point is to say, I want to give you a chance to demonstrate your motivation to learn. And so, I should put you in situations where you actually get to do things that are similar to the job and then you have a chance to practice before you have to demonstrate those skills. So an example of this that I used to run, I used to hire salespeople and a colleague and I started asking them to sell us a rotten apple. And we figured if you could sell a rotten apple, you could sell anything.

And you know, some of the responses were hilarious. I remember one candidate who came in and said, look, this may look like a rotten apple, but it's actually an age and t-capple. And I had some ethics concerns then, but after checking that, you know, he was willing to admit that, no, this was just a sales bitch. I heard him, he ended up being the highest performing salesperson I ever brought in. And, you know, I think, would instinctively I would have done is I would have said,

all right, you're gonna sell me a rotten apple. Go. What that's gonna do is hire me the salesperson who thinks best on their feet. And that, yeah, that can be a useful skill in sales. But ultimately, the salesperson I want to hire is the one who does a lot of reflection and research and figures out over time the best pitch.

And so I would start to give the candidate the prompted advance and then let them put a lot of thought into it and come in. And that was often the candidate who impressed me the most was the one who said, all right, I actually have six different pitches prepared here. And then as soon as I rejected the first one, they would immediately pivot and say, you know what, you're right.

Age and teak apples, they just, you know, they kinda stink. You can't eat them, you don't wanna display them on your mantle, but you know what you can do with those? You can plant the apple seeds. And I'm going to sell you these at a lower price than the supermarket does if you're looking for apple seeds. And that was much more about preparation than it was about rapid thinking.

And I think that there's no reason why we couldn't design more interviews to give people a chance to show what they're willing to learn, not just what they already know. Fair enough. I have to admit that, and I may have mentioned this to you before, I feel like I am terrible at seeing hidden potential. I too quickly arrive at judgments often based on metrics that you're doing your best to discredit,

like credentialism or past experience. And I've seen other of my colleagues over the years who are more nurturing of junior talent, work with people who I initially thought, well, there's no way they're gonna be really good and turn them into stars. And I'm interested in getting better at this and I wonder what you would say about that.

What's your advice? I would say you should be last judgmental, Dan. Clearly, of myself or others. Both, all of the above. Do we have to choose one? No, I think all of the above. I think you've become very judgmental about your tendency to judge, though.

And maybe that's helping you transcend it. Yes. Which I like. I think that's one of the few things that deserves to be judged swiftly and harshly, is rushing the judgment, ironically enough. So you can be meta-judgmental. I give you permission to do that, license, to do it as often as you want, in fact. So why are you so quick to dismiss people's potential

if they lack credentials or pedigree or experience? Off the top of my head, I think two things. One is just cognitive shortcuts or attractive to people who are Russian and I do a lot of Russian. Another thing is just bias and prejudice, coming out of a family with parents who were overeducated, I think I just came up in an achievement, oriented culture.

What does David Brooks call it? The Achieve Tron, and I think that is in like a feted partnership with the rushing that all lands on me, not spotting hidden potential. Yeah, I was thinking about the rushing part in particular. You are not a patient person by disposition, although you are as a writer. It turns out.

Yeah, I think that being more patient in forming conclusions about people would be sort of the objective here, right? And then the question is, how do you force yourself to do that? So I actually think you have the raw material right in front of you, which is you told me you had missed hidden potential. So what are some examples of that? Well, there were some junior producers that I worked with at ABC News, who I would watch my colleagues, fellow anchors, or correspondence, attached themselves to, and then I would see that these junior producers who at first

I didn't find very impressive became people that, no, I want to co-op them and work with them. And I really tried to take that in and realize, you know, you write about this and give and take the first book of yours that I read, there you talk about this incredible teacher, I believe, who just saw the potential in anybody who crossed their path. And I just, I remember reading that and feeling some shame, which is rarely helpful, but let's just say some, it was an aha moment of

realizing that I don't do that. So what though? I mean, what's the cost? So, you know, you don't give a junior producer a shot. Why do you care? Why is that a big deal? There will be other great producers who come along. Surely. That's true. That's true. But anybody's in a leadership position and I define leadership broadly. You're going to be interacting with other people in your world. If you're dismissing people too quickly, putting them too quickly in the bad bucket, you are missing out on opportunities for cooperation and collaboration that could be incredibly valuable. Valuable in what ways? To yourself and to the other people.

And that goes back to what we were talking about before, which is that if you believe in the data seems strongly suggested that the quality of your relationships will dictate the quality of your life, well then this becomes quite urgent. Okay, so you're making the case for me. This is good. Motivational interview complete. Part of what I'm struck by, Dan, as we talk about this, is that for you, this is both a Y2 problem and a how-to problem. Yes. And the how is not useful until you've crystallized the Y. So the reason for you to do this is you're missing out on people who are going to make you better. And it's also going to make them better.

And so it's a win-win. And you're very motivated by the Venn diagram where your self-interest aligns and overlaps with other people's benefit. I think you've called that in light and selfishness. Yes. And I think that that resonates a lot. So if you miss out on people's potential, you're shooting yourself in the foot and you're, you know, you're kind of disadvantaged them. And then when you remember that, you have to go to the how. Right. And let's go to the how in a second. I just want to add one more thing on the why, which is, I don't want to be that type of person.

It doesn't match with my values. I want to be the type of person who is useful as possible on a panoramic sense. Okay, so now we have in Jim March's language, we have the logic of appropriateness, not just the logic of consequence. So before you had a couple of instrumental reasons, you know, it's going to help me succeed, it's going to help the other person grow and succeed.

But now you've got an identity reason, which is this is who I want to be. I want to be a champion of other people's potential. Great. Okay. So you show up to your next interview, you're looking to hire a producer. And I think you start by reminding yourself of that, I want to be a champion of potential. And I think you go into the interview and you say, my job is not to conclude that this person has the potential to succeed in this

job or that this person is the right hire. But my task as an interviewer is to try to figure out where they're hidden potential lies. And then even if I don't hire them, I might know somebody else who's looking, who would have a spot that that person would be a great contributor for. I might have a few suggestions that might be relevant for this person to keep developing their potential. And then your mindset is shifted. And then I think that's where I would start to say, okay, I want you to gather a work sample.

I want you to see this person learn. I want you to see this person use some of their talents and there's another call you whole exercise that I really like where they ask you before the interview. Tell me about your passions in a questionnaire and tell me about some skills that you've built over time and some strengths you would love to showcase. And that way, you get to direct them as a candidate on part of where the interview should go. And so I think you could try a version of that and ask

this person before they come in, okay, what's something you would love to be able to demonstrate to me or what's something you're extremely passionate about that you'd love to share to me, or what's something you're, you're extremely passionate about that you'd love to share with me. And what that will do is that'll give you a more rounded picture of the person. It'll allow you to see some things that maybe you didn't think of as totally relevant to the job, or some skills that you didn't quite think

to ask about. And I think that increases the likelihood that you see their potential. Now, whether that potential is a match for what you're looking for, I think is an open likelihood that you see their potential. Now whether that potential is a match for what you're looking for, I think is an open question. That's extremely helpful. I'm aware, actually, that we're pretty much

at the end of our time, but if there is a one big question, I just wanna ask you before I let you go, which is you end the book and justine the producer on this episode pointed this out, it really hit her. So I wanna do right by her and also hit me. So I'm gonna read right by her and also hit me. So I'm going to read to you

what you wrote. Not long ago it dawned on me that imposter syndrome is a paradox. Others believe in you, you don't believe in yourself, yet you believe yourself instead of them. If you doubt yourself, shouldn't you also doubt your low opinion of yourself? I now believe that imposter syndrome is a sign of hidden potential. It feels like other people are overestimating you, but it's more likely that you're underestimating yourself. They've recognized the capacity for growth that you can't see. When multiple people believe in you, it might be time to believe them. So I read that to you for you to hold forth as we wrap up here.

Yeah, part of the inspiration, I guess, for this aha moment for me was research that Bissima Toofik did showing that when you have imposter thoughts more often, you actually tend to achieve more, grow more, contribute more to others. And it's like, why would that be? Part of that is because imposter thoughts can be motivation. They can be fuel to close the gap between what you think

you're capable of and what other people expect of you. And I wrote about that and think again. But I think part of that, I realized, is also that we can all be hard on ourselves, you know, in thinking, well, I know myself better than other people do. And therefore, like, you know, if you really knew me, you wouldn't believe in me. And what we're forgetting is, yeah, you know yourself, you have more information about yourself, but it's also biased because you're seeing yourself

from the inside instead of from the outside, just like we talked about earlier with what happens when you're spinning through the air trying to rip the entry on a dive. And you also have too much information about yourself. You're anchored on your own view with lots and lots of data points. Other people are more neutral. They're more objective. They can compare you to other people that they have the same amount of information about.

And so with multiple people independently look at you and say, yeah, I think you have the potential to really improve in this or I think you have the potential to be great at that. Chances are that they're more accurate judges than you are. And I think I would say it's probably time to listen to them and consider their view. And over time, of course, you're not going to build confidence before you hit your goal. You build confidence through working toward your goal. And I guess, Stan, this is one of the most important things that I learned as a diver. I would stand on the end of the board terrified, not wanting to go. And I would lay in bed at night imagining myself trying to use visualization to, you know,

to picture myself doing the dive. And then sometimes I would have a dream that I did it. I'm like, okay, today is the day. And I'd show up at practice, and I'd climb on the board, and I still wouldn't feel ready. And so I'd wait and think, okay, maybe tomorrow I'm going to feel ready. And when I was writing this book, it finally hit me that you don't have to wait until you're ready to take the leap. The way you become ready is by taking the leap.

I always love talking to you. Is there something you wanted to talk about today that I didn't give you a chance to? I know this is one of your first interviews for the new book. No, I didn't have a particular agenda in mind. Maybe we could direct your listeners to the quiz if they want to gauge their own character skills. But where do they find it? So if you go to adamgrant.net, there's a hidden potential quiz. It'll assess how often you tend to seek discomfort versus operate like a sponge versus being imperfectionist. And then you'll get a score on what your current character skill is

that you use consistently, and then one that you might want to work on developing further to unlock your hidden potential. And it's actually pretty fun. I have to say, if I do say so myself, it takes about five minutes, and then you get a window into where you might want to go next. I recommend everybody go to that website

and check out all of the things Adam is doing in particular two of his past books have had a big impact on me, think again, and give and take. And he also has an excellent podcast with two, actually one called ReThink and the other called WorkLife. And Adam, what else am I missing

in terms of the plug zone here? It's always you've done more than enough, Dan. You always add to yourself. Thank you. Thank you again for coming on. Really appreciate it. Honored to be here, as always. Thanks again to Adam Grant.

I always love having him on. Thank you to you for listening. Go give us a rating or a review that really helps. Also go check out all the stuff I'm doing on social media. That also helps. Thank you most of all to everybody who works so hard on this show. 10% happier is produced by Justin Davy,

Gabrielle Zuckerman, Lauren Smith, and Tara Anderson. DJ Cashmere is our senior producer, Marissa Schneiderman, is our senior editor, and Kimi Regler is our executive producer, scoring and mixing by Peter Bonnaventure of Ultraviolet Audio, and Nick Thorburn of the Great Band, Islands, wrote our theme, check out his new album. We'll see you on Friday for a bonus.

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