Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - The Science of Failing Well | Amy Edmondson

Episode Date: January 24, 2024

A Harvard Business School professor discusses how to get good at “intelligent failure.”Amy C. Edmondson is the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at the Harvard Business School. Her latest book is called the Right Kind of Wrong. Her research examines psychological safety and teaming within and between organizations.In this episode we talk about:The problems of shame, perfectionism, and social mediaHow not to get caught up in analysis paralysis The importance of self-compassion and a growth mindsetThe benefits of worrying with someone elseWhy redundancy is your friendHow to discuss failure without assigning blameWhy accepting your smallness can be freeingTaking the time to learn from failureThe cognitive framework: stop, challenge, and chooseHow to have a healthier relationships with anxiety and failureCreating a culture of psychological safetyRecognizing that not everybody in society has the same permission to take risks Related Episodes:Self-Compassion Ain’t Always Soft | Kristin NeffSign up for Dan’s weekly newsletter hereFollow Dan on social: Instagram, TikTokTen Percent Happier online bookstoreSubscribe to our YouTube ChannelOur favorite playlists on: Anxiety, Sleep, Relationships, Most Popular EpisodesFull Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/tph/podcast-episode/amy-edmondson-2023Additional Resources:Download the Ten Percent Happier app today: https://10percenthappier.app.link/installSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey kids, failure really does get a bad rap. But if you're not failing regularly, you're probably not taking enough risks or running enough experiments in your life. Today we're going to talk to a researcher who has dedicated much of her career to studying how to fail well or how to get good at which she calls intelligent failure. Amy C. Edmondson is the Novartis professor of leadership and management at the Harvard Business School. Her latest book is called The Right Kind of Wrong.

We talked about the major problems of shame, perfectionism and social media, how not to get caught up in analysis paralysis, the importance of self compassion and also of having a growth mindset, the benefits of worrying with somebody else instead of on your own. Why redundancy is your friend?

How to discuss failure with your team without blaming people? The crucial role of psychological safety, which is a key aspect of Professor Edmondson's work, and it's something that I work on pretty hard in my own life with varying degrees of success. And why accepting your smallness in the face of the infinite universe can be very freeing when it comes to failure. This is the second episode in our sanely ambitious series, a popular franchise here on the show.

Monday we talked to Daniel Goldman about the science of optimal performance. Next week we're talking about how to boost your attention span and the science of when to quit, to quit a job or project or even a relationship. Anyway, today it's Amy Edmondson and it's coming right up. When you visit Audible, there are endless ways to ignite your imagination. With over 750,000 titles, including bestsellers, there's a listen for every type of listener. One of my favorite types of audiobook is a memoir read by the author. So I'm currently enjoying Walking in My Joy in These Streets, written and narrated by the

one and only Jennifer Lewis. Discover all the best in audiobooks, podcasts, and originals, featuring authentic Canadian voices and celebrity talent. You might want to try some new Audible Canadian originals like The Downloaded, a sci-fi adventure featuring Brendan Fraser and Luke Kirby, or Mistletoe Murders 2, a cozy mystery featuring Kobe Smulders. A first listen is waiting for you

when you start your free trial at audible.ca. Start your free trial at audible.ca. My family and I use Airbnb's all the time, especially when we take beach vacations. I love being able to get a spot that is super close to the beach, but way less expensive than staying at a beachfront hotel. Don't get me wrong, I like hotels now and again,

but being able to have your own house, especially on a beachfront hotel. Don't get me wrong, I like hotels now and again, but being able to have your own house, especially on a beach vacation where you've got tons of stuff, buggy boards, et cetera, it's really nice to have a house you can cook for yourself, have your friends over. We love Airbnb's. Speaking of beaches,

maybe you wanna go somewhere warm over the winter. While you're away, you could Airbnb your home and make some extra money for the trip. Whether you could use some extra money to cover some bills or for something a little more fun, your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb.ca slash host. Welcome to the Sam and Billy Show. Each week, we'll be taking you behind the scenes of our lives and have a good old gossip

about everything. We're going to be covering it all from date nights, holidays and parties, house renovations and the school run. Oh, don't remind me I've got to do that after this. And we want to hear from you guys. So if you've got any burning questions or are looking for some life advice, make sure you get in touch. New episodes are released every Tuesday, so if you haven't already,

make sure you're following the Sam and Billy show wherever you listen to your podcasts. Professor Amy Edmondsson, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for having me. It's a pleasure. We have all sorts of academics and researchers on this show, and I love asking them how they got interested in their subject. I'm particularly interested with you because you study failure. So what went wrong or right in your life to lead you to this expertise? So many things. But let me answer more seriously.

I study failure because I'm interested in organizational learning. And organizational learning centrally involves learning from failure. And failure is a big category, as we'll get into. But I am passionate about helping organizations work as they should in a changing world. And that means they have to be able to confront and work with failure in a productive way. To what extent has your research focused on individuals? Because I think a lot of people listening to this show

may not consider themselves leaders of organizations and more, you know, just individual contributors in one way or another. Well, it's focused largely on individuals, but individuals in the context of their jobs. And it's probably more precise to say, I've focused on teams or groups, individuals in the context of other people with whom they're working to get hard things done.

So that could be a company, that could be a family, that could be a volunteer group, that could be a team, a rock band, whatever. Yeah. And I'm intrigued by how individuals work in their teams, or how do we interact with each other? How do we ask questions when we don't know what to do? How do we offer ideas that might be crazy? That gets me to one of my hobby horses,

which is this idea of social fitness or interpersonal hygiene, that we live in a deeply interconnected world, and yet very few of us ever taught how to interact with other human beings in this world. Absolutely. And in so many ways that is central, you know, central to our effectiveness, central to our happiness, and we get off the rails so quickly with people. We interact in deeply problematic ways when the going gets tough.

Yeah, well, my own laboratory of one, I can say that is very true for myself. So you're pointing at yourself. So how do you define failure? Failure is an undesired outcome, usually unexpected, but unexpected and undesired. It has to be somewhat of an event or a result, because I can trip on the sidewalk and that's not my preferred thing to do,

but it's not a failure if I don't scrape my knee or break a bone, right? It's just a mistake, it's just a trip. A failure generally refers to something of meaning to us that didn't go as we had hoped. Yeah, so if you're walking down the street and you trip, it's not great, but it's not as consequential as writing a book and having everybody hate it. Every everybody hate it.

Absolutely nobody buys it. You know, 15 people buy it. That would be a failure. Got it. So you called the book the right kind of wrong. That seems to indicate that there is a good kind of failure. Maybe you could tax on the types of failure for us. So I identify three types of failure. Basic failure, complex failure, and intelligent failure. And it's probably clear by now that intelligent failure is the right kind

of wrong. That's the good kind. Neither of the other two are arguably good in any way. And in fact, they're largely preventable. And so let me maybe describe each of them in turn. A basic failure is a failure with a single cause. An undesired result or outcome with a single cause. Usually human error. Not always, but usually human error. And a complex failure is multi-causal. It's something that goes wrong that has not one, but multiple interacting factors that gave rise to it.

And the type or that, you know, the definition is where, let me put it this way, the quintessential complex failure is one that has multiple causes and none of the causes on their own would have led to the failure. It's the perfect storm. It's the fact that they all came together at just the wrong time and just the wrong way and led to a failure. Those two are not desirable and largely preventable. And then the third kind of failure, intelligent failure, is an undesired result of a novel foray into new territory. So what that means is, essentially, you tried something that you very much hoped and believed and had good reason to believe it might work, but it failed.

So it's an experiment that failed. But failed with felicitous results in some way. Yes. Yes. And why it's the right kind of wrong is that you learn from it and even more importantly, it was the only way to learn what you needed to know to make progress. And so this would be true whether it's a blind date in your pursuit of a life partner, or a clinical trial in a pharmaceutical company, or simply a thoughtful remark that landed badly in a meeting. All of those would qualify as

intelligent failures if they didn't work out the way you had hoped, because you couldn't have known in advance. You had to try it to see what happens. And so the criteria, if you will, for an intelligent failure is that it's in pursuit of a goal. It's in new territory. There's no way to just look it up and follow the recipe. You have to try it to make progress. And it's driven by a hypothesis, or you have good reason to believe it might work. And it's no bigger than it has to be, right? You're not throwing excess resources or time or energy or money into something that is uncertain. You're testing it at the right scale. There are so many interesting things in what you're saying

there about the ingredients for an intelligent failure. But one thing that I'm just honing in on, I've talked about this a bunch on the show, so the audience won't be surprised to hear it, but my team and I've been doing a lot of experiments and trying to fail intelligently on the regular. And one thing I try to remember though is that sometimes there's actually a roadmap out there and I don't need to go do an experiment that somebody else in my field or a related field has already done. And that actually feels important to remember.

Precisely. And that's part of the do your homework or have a hypothesis that is informed by available knowledge. Because it is truly a wasteful failure, not an intelligent failure, if you could have easily picked up the phone and asked someone or easily Googled,

you know, the question you have on the internet and find out that 10,000 people have tried something or other and this works and that doesn't work and you say yes. I can learn vicariously. I don't have to do it myself. The key word there seems to be easily because I've been a part of organizations before where we lapse into analysis paralysis and do a ton of homework and spend months, you know, wrapping ourselves around the axle instead of just doing the fucking thing.

Right. And easily, you know, could mean different things in different contexts, depending on the size and scale of the goal, the project, you'll have more or less resources with which to do that background check. But I think a rule of thumb is get a few thoughtful people

together who are likely to have some insight into this and just run it by them. Like see whether others have thought differently about this. Sometimes just a good friend or a good colleague can see an obvious flaw that you missed or they've recently tried something and they can tell you how that worked. So, you know, a little bit of low-hanging fruit will go a long way. Well, there's so much more to say about how to fail well, but before we get into a lot of detail there,

let's just step back and talk about what are the obstacles here? What stands in the way for most of us when we, you know, are considering running an experiment? Well, I think we have a strong and socially reinforced desire to succeed, right, and not to fail. We want to look good, not bad. So that makes us reluctant to take risks. And novel territory requires us to take risks. And by the way, novel could be new to the world. You know, you're a scientist and no one has ever looked

or tried to do this thing before. Or novel could just be new for you. You're a little kid learning to ride a bicycle. And there's no way to learn to ride that bicycle without a few failures along the way. But you have to decide that it's worth the effort. So what gets in the way is that risk aversion that we naturally have driven in part

by wanting other people to think well of us, driven in part by just a natural aversion to confronting our own shortcomings, our own failures, even privately, we don't like it. And then I think also driven by or influenced by a lack of clarity about the difference between good failures and bad failures. So you list in the book three primary obstacles, aversion, confusion and fear.

Confusion it seems to be the one you touched on last. And that I think is the point of this whole interview and the point of your book is just to let people know actually there are ways to do this intelligently. Exactly right. And I think of the aversion, confusion and fear as roughly emotional, just that emotional, instinctive desire not to fail in any way, shape, or form. Confusion relates to the cognitive, the sort of lack of good concepts and tools to help us fail well.

And then the fear is the interpersonal stigma, you know, the social stigma. So it's the social dimension. And all three of those interact in lovely ways to make us risk averse. So how do we get over these three? Well, I think, you know, maybe this is too sort of straightforward, but I think we get over the confusion with a clear, compelling framework that you can use and you can just sort of say, hey, this is an intelligent failure.

At least this is an opportunity to take some intelligent risks and see what happens. And I've done my homework to figure out whether this might work, might make sense. And I'm willing to take that risk because it makes sense, right? It to take that risk because it makes sense. It makes sense for me, it makes sense for the team. And then the aversion, I think the best we can do on the aversion is talk ourselves into

a new way of thinking. Just remind ourselves that actually we live in a complex, uncertain world. We're fallible human beings. We were not put here to have everything just go smoothly and perfectly. That's not the nature of life. That's not the nature of reality. In a way, it's like maturity. It's getting more thoughtful about what your expectations should be and learning to love the world we're in, not the one you

wish we were in. Over the last couple of months, I've been running an experiment in social media. I always resisted social media. I still have a lot of mixed feelings about social media, but it was argued convincingly to me by people in my orbit that I need to start participating in it. So I've tried to become sort of like a note of sanity in the morass of social media by putting out hopefully useful little videos a couple times a week.

And I just actually filmed a few videos that go right to the point that you're talking about, which is, I just literally right before I walked in here did a little video seated on my son's bedroom floor talking about the concept of non-attachment to results, which is a Buddhist concept you're nodding your head in recognition. It's this idea that we live in an entropic universe characterized by impermanence and constant change, and we can work as hard as we want, but we cannot control the results.

So as David Axelrod, the famous Democratic political strategist, has said, all we can do is everything we can do. That's very well put. And that's completely consistent with modern cognitive behavioral therapy and many other clinical fields that help people, they might not use the word non-attachment, but help people think in healthier ways about the actual events in their life so that they can be more empowered and happier in their lives and more effective in their work?

Another little expression that comes out of the Buddhist tradition actually comes from a Buddhist teacher, but it's not explicitly Buddhist that I know of. It comes from Joseph Goldstein, who's a great meditation teacher. And I've told this story before, so I apologize for the repetition for people who've heard it. But there was a time when I was talking to Joseph many years ago, when my wife and I were in the middle of an infertility crisis, and I was really upset about it. And he was sympathetic, but then he said something that kind of pissed me off, which was,

if it's not one thing, it's another. And I've been living with that for a while. And I really see the wisdom of it now, which is we have a healthy kid now, but it's not like I don't have any more problems. I got plenty of problems. If it's not one thing, it's another. The mind will always find something to fixate on.

And I just think this goes to this cognitive reappraisal that you're calling for here to help us get over our aversion and fear, which is to understand that few things will go smoothly to expect discomfort along the way. Exactly. And, you know, Victor Frankel famously said or wrote between stimulus and response, there is a space, right?

We think of it as something happens and then I respond and there's nothing I can do about my response. It's my response. It's instinctive. It's natural. He says, no, there is a space there. And in that space lies our power, our choice, right? Our freedom to actually think about and respond to things in a way that works better for us and for those around us. And that is the essence of cognitive behavior therapy and so many other, I think, philosophical traditions as well, which is learn to take that breath,

learn to take that deep breath and sort of challenge your initial response and say, you know, how accurate is that? How helpful is that? Is there another way for me to think about this situation? And if so, let's choose that. Is there another way for me to think about this situation? And if so, let's choose that. Well said. On the subject of the barriers to running experiments, the barriers to our willingness to fail intelligently, how big a problem is perfectionism? It's a huge problem. And I'm actually a big fan of Thomas Curran's new book on perfectionism. It's a huge problem. I'm actually a big fan of Thomas Kern's new book on perfectionism. He's a real expert in perfectionism. But perfectionism, it's one of those things that people will say

in a job interview as your biggest weakness. It's one of those things that's actually culturally quite approved of. And so we think of it, oh yeah, perfectionism. How bad could that be? Well, it's very bad, right? Because it's a crippling belief that you are supposed to be, and even could be perfect at your sport,

your work, your parenting. It's not realistic. And perfectionism leaves us caught in a deep unhappiness because we cannot, and we know we cannot, measure up to our unrealistic standards of perfect. Yeah. It's kind of self-protective in some ways because it keeps you from taking risks. Exactly.

There's a term in psychology called self-handicapping, which is where people are because of perfectionist tendencies, unwilling to take the more challenging task, the more challenging course, the more challenging assignment, because it's too scary to think about coming up short. So then that leads to choosing kind of the easier stuff. And yeah, you can get a 10 out of 10 on the middle school math test, but that doesn't really leave you better off if you're in high school. Yes. And if you're unwilling to take any risks, and if you're so afraid of failure that you're not going to try anything new,

that's not going to serve you well in the long term. And I think actually that I've heard it argued quite convincingly on this show that this aversion to discomfort is in many ways at the root of this epidemic of anxiety we're seeing particularly among young people right now. I think that's right. And of course, your earlier comment about reluctance to fully embrace social media is quite related to that topic because I think some of the anxiety and

some of the anxiety related to perfectionism and self-handicapping does come from the pernicious effects of social media on the lives of the young. It presents to them curated, idealized, unrealistic images of other people's lives and experiences. And even though they're maybe only posting themselves in their best light, it's hard for the brain to fully appreciate that that's what everyone else is doing also. And so then it just looks like by comparison I keep suffering, and they're literally suffering. And so it's an attachment, if you will, to an unrealistic set of beliefs about what life should be like.

What do you recommend then? Because it's hard to recommend that people get off social media forever because it is where life has lived now. It's true, although there's other evidence, other research to suggest that not just the problem I described before of stylized, you know, non-representative images of each other's lives and experiences, but it's also not a real way. You know, social media is ironically very anti-social. When you are alone and typing something or posting something or broadcasting something, hoping others will see it and like it, you are not interacting.

I know that's obvious, but it's as if we don't give that enough thought. We're not giving that enough attention. What does it mean when we're not just truly interacting with each other in a way that forces us and allows us to kind of adjust and listen and sometimes be taking center stage and other times not. We learn that sort of dance of how to be with others and we learn more about ourselves

in the midst of that dance as part of growing up. And if you take too much of that experience away from people, it's a giant social experiment. And so you say, well, what should we do? And I don't think we know, but there's some sort of new perspectives on, you can at least take away the phones for kids in elementary school and high school

during the day, like at least give them a chance to be with each other, at least give them a chance to cognitively focus, to have that joy of interacting with a hard problem for a long time until you crack it. And I think that's where real joy and satisfaction and self-confidence come from, not from putting up some post and having someone like it or not from texting at a distance

and feeling like you're having a friendship. Yes, ironically, we're seeing from the data I've seen that young people, and I don't mean to be, I don't wanna be like the old guy who's saying, well, kids today or whatever, I think if I was a kid today, I'd be doing exactly what all the other kids are doing. So I say this with no more superiority.

But I think young people have been put in a situation where the social media plus the pandemic means that they're not given the chance to do as much socializing. And then this aversion to discomfort means that they're even engaging in fewer relationships, fewer romantic relationships, real friendships, and this avoidance might seem like it's gonna protect you, but actually it is the exposure, the careful exposure over time to discomfort, that is the portal to, as you just said, the greatest sources of life satisfaction. Absolutely, and I want to echo what you said. This isn't us judging others, the young in particular. It's lamenting, it's feeling, because we did

it, right? I mean, people in our generation built these technologies and put them out there. So, you know, we have created the situation and I think we owe it to ourselves and to the future generations of the current young to absolutely do the research we need to do. It's happening to understand its impact so that we can then make more thoughtful decisions going forward. Coming up, Amy Edmondson talks about taking the time to learn from failure, how to discuss failure without blaming people and her cognitive framework of stop, challenge and choose. Hi, I'm Anna. And I'm Emily. We're the hosts of Wanderer's podcast Terribly Famous, a show where we bring you outrageous true stories about our most famous celebrities.

Our latest season is all about the catwalk queen Naomi Campbell. The years Naomi had to fight to be treated fairly in an industry that was overwhelmingly white. That drive saw her break down barriers and reached the pinnacle of high fashion but it also got her into some dangerous situations when it spilled over into an anger she couldn't control. In our new season Naomi Campbell's model behaviour, we tell the story of how a young girl from South London became a trailblazing black icon, but had some very public falls

of how she stood up to the British tabloids and won and the lengths she had to go to to be the first black woman in history to make the cover of French Vogue. But she risks losing it all when her explosive behaviour lands her in court. Follow Terribly Famous wherever you listen to podcasts or listen early and ad-free on Wondery Plus on Apple Podcasts or the Wondery app.

Hello, I'm Elizabeth Day, the creator and host of How to Fail. It's the podcast that celebrates the things in life that haven't gone right, and what, if anything, we've learned from those mistakes to help us succeed better. Each week, my guests share three failures, sparking intimate, thought-provoking and funny conversations. You'll hear from a diverse range of voices, sharing what they've learned through their

failures. Join me Wednesdays for a new episode each week. This is an Elizabeth Day and Sony Music Entertainment original podcast. Listen now wherever you get your podcasts. We're gonna get to intelligent failure in a deep way right quick, but I just do want to say if anybody's listening and you're a grown up and you're worried about like overuse of social media, one quick little-awareness, otherwise known as mindfulness, that can give you a leg up when it's you versus the greatest super computer's ever known to man. Because that's what's happening when you're interacting with a social media app,

you are facing off against the smartest people designing the smartest machines to hook you. But if you can notice, if you have this self-awareness to notice that you haven't eaten all day or you're actually mindlessly eating while you're scrolling or you're in a rage loop or you're hating your whole life, you might be able to wake up out of that daydream and put the phone down. So that to me is one of the biggest pieces of advice to give to people. And again, no superiority complex here. This is hard stuff. I fall into these traps too, after many years of meditation.

Okay, so let's talk about how to fail intelligently. You say there are five component points of intelligent failure. Yes, and I know it's clear, but I'll just say it anyway, which is it's not really that we wake up in the morning and we're hellbent on failure. What the book is really about

is how do we take intelligent risks knowing that some of them and maybe many of them will end in failure i.e. the undesired result. So how do you do that? Well, I think number one is get clear about the goal. Is the goal to learn to ride a bicycle? You know, the goal might be to find a life partner, the goal might be to do a really great job on this new project at work. Whatever the goal is, what I'm about to talk about in terms of risk taking, experimenting, is in pursuit of something that matters to you. So that's number one. It's driven by a goal. Number two is it's in new terrain, or at least it seems to you pretty clearly to be in new terrain. There's no way to get where you want to go without at least a little bit of experimenting, of trial and possibly failure. And number three,

you've done your homework. And I don't mean an endless background on everything, but you've done just enough background information seeking to know what is easily known about this thing you're about to try. You know, if you're about to go on a date with a friend of a friend, you know, just make sure you've checked out, oh, they hate something that you love. Maybe that is one that you could just not even bother trying. And then the fourth relates to size. Do not risk your entire life savings on something that might fail. Again, I know that's obvious, but at least in the company setting where I do most of my research, I see bets that are larger than they needed to be happen all the time, in part because the smaller, thoughtful bets that could have preceded them were not taken. In the desire not to fail, sort of in the laboratory, we end up failing in the field.

And so it's those four things in pursuit of a goal, new territory with a hypothesis and as small as possible. And then the fifth thing is you take the time, and this is of course really important to learn from it, to figure out what happened and why and what does it mean for where I go next. Is there a process for that fifth point for learning from it well? Well, it depends on what it is. If this is a big project with many people

in your company involved, then the process will undisputably involve bringing people together to share their perspectives, to share their experiences. If it's something that's just in your private life on your own, the process may be solo. But the essential question in that process starts with what happened. Not who did it, not what caused it, but just very clean and clear what happened.

Let's tell the story. Let's tell the story of the failure. And the point of that is to try to get, in a sense, the facts out, the events out before you judge them. You know, before you figure, oh, it was that. I knew it was gonna be that. We don't wanna think that way. We wanna just think cleanly and clearly about the events so that we can then say, ah, okay,

I think I understand more about this now. I now know what I'm gonna try next. How do you do that without blaming? Well, first, recognize that you will blame, you know, you will spontaneously blame, we're wired to blame. But then walk yourself back from the blame by saying to yourself, that's sort of the quick and superficial analysis. But now I would rather do a more thoughtful analysis. You know, our immediate responses and generally, well, it depends on which personality type you are, but generally we're looking for someone else to blame. And it's attractive, it's easy.

Well, it didn't work. It's your fault. When we take even just a little bit of time and honesty and bring it to the problem, we realize, oh, you know, there's some things I did that contributed to this problem as well. You talked about personality types. There are some personality types that will blame others and other personality types that will blame themselves and get into a shame. I have some toxic combination of the two. But there's, there are at least two bad roots here. Blame others, castigate yourself. Right, right.

And both are partly true, but never entirely, or rarely entirely true. Occasionally it's entirely true. Occasionally you woke up in the morning just looking for trouble and you caused it. But that's not very typical. So the knee jerk reaction to sort of completely blame yourself and fall on your sword is not helpful, but neither is the knee jerk reaction to sort of, you know, completely blame yourself and fall on your sword is not helpful, but neither is the knee jerk reaction to just say it's and I'm blameless. I'm entirely off the hook. And by the way, I think that's a far less attractive personality type, you know, the type that

thinks I have never done anything wrong. It's always everybody else. I agree. It's less attractive. And shame is not so useful and you write about it. No, shame is crippling, shame is painful, shame tends to hold us back. We ruminate, we wallow because we don't feel worthy then of even being in the arena. You know, shame is different than... Brunet Brown makes the distinction between shame and guilt where guilt is more specifically focused on an action And you can always change that whereas shame is sort of oh, it's me right. I'm the problem. I'm just not a worthwhile person Yeah to invoke Buddhism again, which is a bit of a tick for me. It's a good tick I hope so

teachers often talk about the difference between guilt slash shame and what's sometimes referred to as wise remorse. So wise, and I think this is consonant with Brené's idea that wise remorse is focused on, okay, so I made a mistake there, but I don't need to add on a whole story about how irrevocably terrible, which by the way is just more ego. True. It's putting you in the center of the universe where you don't belong. Yes. I love the phrase, wise remorse. I'm very happy to be introduced to it because it's, I think it's the doorway into a good apology.

It's the doorway into learning. It gives us the power in a way to take responsibility for the contributions we have made and resolve to do better. Yes. I agree to the extent that I can remember to do it. Oh, yeah. Well, that's a whole nother story. It is. Well, okay. So on that point, then we've talked about the pernicious implications of both blame and shame, but if we wanna become what you call a master of intelligent failure,

how do we avoid those two pitfalls? It might come back to that detachment, right? That we won't avoid them entirely 100% of the time, but we can learn to recover quickly. Like we can learn to kind of catch ourselves doing this silly thing, right? Doing this silly thing of thinking we're in charge of the universe again when we're not.

And just catch correct. Notice, notice where I'm going and then say, maybe that's not the most helpful or healthy place to go. I think you can speed up, I guess in my own personal experience, I think I have sped up the time where I can talk myself off the ledge instead of getting lost in the shame or in the anxiety about the things I've done wrong. I can say, okay, turns out you're a fallible human being, still making mistakes. Yep, that's probably not going to change. But what's the key insight from this one? And what do we do next?

Well, it seems like we're getting into the territory of self-compassion here. I'm not, you familiar with this? Yeah, okay, you're nodding your head This is a field that I've been deeply influenced by the honchoed really by a woman named Kristen Neff from the University of Texas Austin and One of the main application points is that you can learn to talk to yourself in a different way after Something untoward has happened. So instead of getting into you're you're person, you're a failure, nobody's ever gonna love you, you're gonna die alone, blah, blah, blah, you can just do exactly what you just did, was deliberately talk to yourself

in a way that you would talk to a friend and say, hey, yeah, everybody makes mistakes, dust yourself off, get back in it, this is what life is. Absolutely, so I think where we're going with this is the science of failing well, or the practice of failing well, or the practice of smart risk taking involves a set of cognitive skills and emotional skills

that you can develop. And it's completely intertwined with the recognition that we and the systems in which we live and operate and work are fallible. There's just fallibility and disappointments around every corner, as well as happy surprises around corners as well. My interest isn't in producing more failures, but in producing more thoughtful risks, so that we let ourselves out of the boxes that we might otherwise put ourselves in and feel better about the things that go wrong along the way.

You talk in your book a lot about a concept that might actually be a pithy encapsulation of everything we've been discussing for the last couple of minutes, which is the growth mindset. Carol Dweck's work, just beautiful, brilliant work, where she identifies two mindsets. One is unfortunately far more common than the other and less healthy. But the two mindsets are the growth mindset. That's the more rare one that's more productive, more healthy, and the fixed mindset. Now, the fixed mindset is the mindset we have when we sort of believe our capabilities most notably our intelligence is fixed. You know, you're born with a high IQ or a low IQ rather than the growth mindset,

which says our capabilities, including our intelligence are like muscles where the more we use them, the more we use them, the more we stretch them, the stronger they get, the better they get. So the kids, for example, with the growth mindset, are willing to take the tough course. They're willing to try the thing that they very well may fail at

because they truly believe this is how they get smarter and better. There's the fixed mindset kids, which many, if not most kids are by the time they're mid-elementary school, start to get a little risk averse. They start to get reluctant. They don't want to be caught out as not smart. And you can readily see the implications of those differences in mindset for long-term growth and success and achievement. So it's important when you're a kid and for the grown-ups listening to this, it's important if you want to learn how to

fail intelligently, take the right risks and succeed in whatever you're doing for the rest of your life from this point onwards. And just to learn that it's actually good to encounter the things that you still have room to improve on, because that's where the future lies. And I was caught off guard one day, really now at least 15 years ago, with my younger son, who's now 22, but was then about seven or eight, asked me to stand at the bottom of the little ski hill that we skied in, not too far from here. And he said, would you go down there and watch me come down? I said, sure, right?

And I stood down at the bottom and Nick takes his little turn. He's not a terribly good skier at the time. He's just a little kid. He gets to the bottom, he said, how'd I do? I said, you did great. And he looked at me like I had just disappointed him. And I was sort of surprised to see that in his face. And then he said, can't you tell me what I didn't do well so I can get better?

That was like a, you know, I could have had a V8 moment because I suddenly realized, A, he is manifesting a growth mindset. I better not screw that up. And B, why not? Right? What is it in us as parents, we internalize these messages that you're supposed to say, great, you're great, you don't know. You don't, and you don't have to say, you're terrible. You say, I liked how you were trying to control your speed and, you know, maybe you could keep your body facing a little more downhill to improve your form, whatever, like lovely, helpful advice for the next run that would help him become

incrementally better, which is what he wanted from me. He didn't want a round of applause. Well, first of all, yeah, that's great that your son is wired that way. And I think that you put your finger on something really important when it comes to giving feedback, whether it's to our kids or to our colleagues, our romantic partners, anybody in our lives, there is a middle path between a round of applause, which is essentially meaningless and most people can sense it, and being hyper critical and micromanaging and disempowering. And it's about giving, you know, reasonable feedback.

Yeah. And it's, you know, I heard someone say the other day, it's advice, not feedback, because what you really want to do is face forward. I mean, I will use the data from the past to inform the future, but the emphasis and it's a meaningful difference. The emphasis is on the future. So I'm not saying, oh, you did this wrong, you did that wrong. I'm saying if you changed this to that, it might work better next time. Yes. Yeah. Yeah, it can be a great end. You know, you put in an amazing effort here, the things I saw that I liked.

And I would say if you're looking for room for improvement, here are a couple of things I also noticed. Right. And liked is really about here are things to keep doing. Like, don't change this because it's working for you. Yes. Yes. And you might want to try that instead of something you did do. Yes. Feedback is really important. We're going to talk about how to create a culture

in whatever context you find yourself in, family, corporate, sports team, whatever. We're going to talk about how to create a culture where people feel comfortable taking risks. But before we get that, let me just talk about some of the blocking and tackling of developing a growth mindset. You touched on this a little bit earlier, but I think it's worth going back to it. You list in the book some cognitive habits for responding to failure, and they include stop, challenge, and choose.

Can you walk us through that? I can, and I alluded to these without those terms earlier in our conversation, but this is a kind of three-step cognitive framework that I learned from a former mentor and boss of mine Larry Wilson many years ago. And it was his translation of the great work of a psychiatrist named Maxie Maltzbee who wrote about rational behavior therapy. Maxie had his six steps to healthier thinking and Larry basically boiled it down in, I think, a very simple and elegant way with stop challenge shoes. And stop is the pause. Stop is the ability to catch yourself about to spiral, or at least head in a negative direction in terms of how you're thinking about the undesired

events in your life. So stop is just pause, breathe. Challenge is just to take a look at the thinking and interrogate it. How rational is that? How true is that? I'm gonna be late for that meeting and I'm telling myself I'm gonna die because I'm not gonna get the sale,

I'm not gonna get the promotion, whatever it is. So it's the end of my life as I know it. Well, actually, no. Let's challenge that thinking and say, and Larry used to say, if I'm late for that meeting, it's inconvenient. I always love that word. It's inconvenient.

It's so wonderfully neutral and with a little, I think touch of humor in it. So challenge your unhealthy and largely inaccurate thinking and then choose the healthier response. Now that could be with some of the things we've been talking about a non-attachment, a kind of more thoughtful diagnosis of what's really going on, what I need to change, what I want to hang on to and choose that response and head forward. I'll role play this with myself,

which I realize is massively self-centered, but I'm into doing anyway. Just say, you know, I talked earlier about my team and I are taking a bunch of risks and trying new things, running a bunch of experiments, some of them work, some of them don't. As I think about that in my own life, I notice that I sometimes,

because I have this anxious tick, I can cast forward into a world of failure where I'm going to lose our home, for example. So if I notice that's happening, and then that is hindering my ability to make smart decisions, I can pause, challenge the thought pattern. Yeah, the thought pattern, the chain, the logical chain that's getting you to the loss of house Yes, rather dramatically. Yes given probably what's really true Yeah, and to go back to Buddhism. There's a word for that propuncia which roughly

Translates into the imperialistic tendency of mind something happens right now and we make a whole mental movie about the horrible ramifications of it And but all the ram of horrible ramifications of it and But all the ram of potential ramifications of it and that's propuncia So I can challenge the propuncia by saying yeah, well dude, even if this goes horribly wrong I think you're still going to be able to pay your mortgage and then I choose To do or not do the thing based on a sort of rational hopefully rational analysis that I've just conducted. Absolutely, and it's cooler too, right?

It's not as hot. It doesn't have the exaggeration and the emotionality to it. It's a little closer, a little more tied to the facts. One of my favorite expressions that I invoke all the time on the show come from Dr. Robert Waldinger at Harvard and his exhortation is never worry alone. And I'm wondering whether you think these cognitive habits for responding to failure are perhaps best employed in groups so that you're not, you know, just stuck inside your

own skull-sized kingdom. Skull-sized kingdom. That's brilliant. That's a David Foster Wallace expression by the way. That's fabulous. And never worry alone. Wallace expression. That's fabulous and never worry alone I'm gonna write that on my wall. So I think the answer is a resounding yes from me I believe that this process is a team sport and I also recognize that there will be times where you're driving along on the Highway or you've woken in the middle of the night in a fit of anxiety

And you can't just wake everybody else up or get everyone else into the car with you. So there will be moments where you have to practice the art of healthy thinking on your own. But when possible and even when it's a little inconvenient, definitely bring others in because they just by by definition, have a different perspective and can help you get there yourself. For me, what's been helpful is to pair

the Kristin Neff self-talk, healthy self-talk, the sort of coach-like self-talk that I can do for myself, channeling my own capacity to mentor others and directing it toward myself in moments when I can't find somebody else to worry with and then every other time worrying with somebody else. I think that's really great. I think that's right and I think also when you're helping others you're doing a sort of a mental drill like it's

so much easier for me to help to talk you off the ledge than to talk myself off. But in the process of helping you see it more clearly and in a more balanced, healthy way, I'm practicing my own skills. Amen. I totally agree with that. And we can do the false dichotomy of viewing the world through self-interest and other interests. You know, either I'm doing shit for myself or I'm doing something for somebody else, but actually doing stuff for other people redounds to your benefit in countless countless ways including the way you just described It's so true and you feel better about yourself and you feel you've made a small difference today

And that's that in itself as a source of reward Coming up Amy talks about how to have a healthier relationship with anxiety and also failure who have a healthier relationship with anxiety and also failure, creating a culture of psychological safety a key term, and recognizing that not everybody in our society has the same permission to take risks. I'm Afwa Hirsch. And I'm Peter Frankipen. And in our new podcast, Legacy,

we explore the lives of some of the biggest characters in history. This season, we delve into the life of Pablo Picasso. The ultimate giant of modern art, everyone has heard of or seen of Picasso work, or the Picasso brand on something. But a man with a complicated, difficult, personal side too that makes us look at his art in a different way.

He was a genius and he was very problematic. Follow Legacy Now wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge entire seasons of Legacy ad free on Amazon Music or by subscribing to Wondery Plus on Apple Podcasts or the Wondery App. Hello I'm Alice Levine and I am one of the hosts of British Scandal. or the Wondery app. to get a hell of a lot more complicated because the you in this story is Fergie, the Duchess of York, X, Y for Prince Andrew and the person who's offered you half a million pounds is an undercover tabloid reporter who's recorded the whole conversation. Oh and just one more thing, promise last one, it's all about to appear on the front page of the news of the world.

In the later season of British Scandal we take you inside the story of the so-called fake shake, the investigative journalist Mazma Mood and the series of explosive sting operations he used to con public figures from Fergie to singer Telysa and former England football coach Sven Gorin Erickson. Follow British Scandal wherever you listen to podcasts or listen early and ad-free on Wondry Plus, on Apple Podcasts or the Wondry app. Honestly, a million pounds, and I still wouldn't introduce you to him.

And that's for your sake. You say in the book that contextual awareness can be a kind of, like, a sort of self-soothing. It can reduce anxiety. So what do you mean by contextual awareness and how is it helpful? I think it starts with what's really at stake. Like what's at risk here?

You know, are you really going to lose your house if this goes south? Because if so, I'm going to advise let's proceed very cautiously. Whereas, is this, you know, you're sort of telling yourself you might lose your house. But in fact, this is just, oh, I might be a little bit embarrassed in front of my colleagues, right, if this doesn't work, so what? Right, that we can live with. So contextual awareness starts with a cool-eyed look at what are the actual stakes primarily related to human safety or financial risks or reputational risks. And the other dimension of context that's worth or reputational risks. And the other dimension of context

that's worth thinking about is uncertainty. How much uncertainty is there? Am I in novel terrain where there's just no data, no evidence, there's no way to get any new knowledge without trial and error? Or am I somewhere where I can just get a good recipe off the internet and have you know, have the meal turn out beautifully. I know that's obvious, but just to the reason why I think it's worth talking

about the landscape created by high, high to low uncertainty and high to low stakes gives us lots of different domains in which to play. And I have seen, you know, I've observed people acting carelessly in a high stakes environment because there really is life and death consequences, your own and others. So it's a matter of just getting in the habit of sizing up context almost effortlessly so that you can enjoy the playful risk takingtaking in low stakes environment and be appropriately cautious and thoughtful in higher stakes environments.

Yes, instead of having a miismatic, vague, nameless dread to be running, which I understand from the inside, he's so to you. Yes, do I? Raising your hand, yeah. So instead of having that, actually just running, having this algorithm running, which is constantly reminding yourself, like you're good, you're okay. Yeah, actually just running, having this algorithm running, which is constantly reminding yourself,

like you're good, you're okay. Yeah, it's okay, right? I mean, most of what you're doing is kind of, you know, in reasonably safe, low risk context. And we should all be having like a little bit more fun experimenting than we naturally do. And I think you've started to hone in on something that is obvious to me and probably obvious to your listeners

that I study this stuff because of that anxiety, that dread, that worry about, you know, not measuring up and failure lurking around every corner. Yeah, I mean, I, yes, sometimes people will say to me, dude, you're so anxious for a happiness expert. I'm like, look, you have the causality wrong. That's right, exactly. Why do you think I became a happiness expert, you say?

You said something there about like having fun, taking risks and I have this fear that I'm gonna reach the end of my life whenever that is and I'm gonna do a life review and wish I could, you know, how about it would be great to live another day at age 45 or live another day at age 32 or whatever. And of course, if I had that ability,

I would find that I was stressed and anxious all day when I was 32 and 45 and whatever. And how can I take that wisdom and from the end of life and incorporate it into my days now? It's a little bit out of the Dickens playbook, right? I'm always coming back to the ghost of Christmas yet to come. There was seemingly no way to change the awful behavior and attitude of Mr. Scrooge until he was shown,

in a dream, I guess, he was shown his future decades from that moment where he's sort of dying a lonely death with no friends, no family, nothing but all his money piled up around him and he suddenly got it. Right, so how do we help people not wait until they're whatever age to say, gosh, I really should have taken more risks,

had more fun, been less anxious when I was 32, when I was 45. How do we do that? And I guess my answer is I write books or I give talks, but we're trying, I think you and I, we're trying to give away the hard fought knowledge that we still can't practice consistently ourselves, but give it away to others to lighten that load. Maybe just slightly increase the chances that people can have with respect to this book

a healthier relationship with failure, right? A healthier relationship with the inevitable things that go wrong, the disappointments and not awful eyes and not catastrophize. Yes, I completely agree. And one thing that I found helpful in this process is just being reminded all the time. You just, it's so easy to listen to a podcast like this and then to revert back to your anxious habits or your risk averse habits. And so you just need to surround yourself with as many reminders as possible. Keep reading books, keep listening to podcasts, surround yourself

with people who you admire. And that really can help you get a leg up here. That's right. Redundancy is your friend. It's okay if you've heard the same message on other podcasts or in other books. It's good to hear it again and in a slightly different way and with different examples, different stories. Yes. Okay, so we've talked a lot about how to create within your own mind an atmosphere of friendliness and congeniality vis-a-vis risk and failure. How do you do that in your interpersonal orbit, on your work team, in your family, etc. etc. Well, one of the things you can do with respect to context awareness is make that explicit,

make it a discussion. I call attention to aspects of the context that strike you as important to keep in mind. Like, gosh, we've never done, I don't think anyone in this company has ever done a project like this before. Do you know of one? Which is really underlining and emphasizing the fact that we're in new territory, we're pioneers, we're going to be trying stuff that is unproven, and that's okay, right? That's what we've signed up to

do. Or conversely, we're going to land this plane safely in Chicago, right? Something that's been done hundreds of times a day for the last however many years. And we're going to be mindful, deeply mindful of the potential risks and unexpected events and problems we might encounter on the way. So calling attention to the aspects of the context that matter most so that we can all get on the same page about our risk tolerance or risk willingness and our availability to each other to support each other both in taking risks and also in making sense of the failures that happen

Getting as much insight from them as we can and figuring out what to do next That all makes sense and there's a concept that you gave a whole TED talk on that has been really influential for me, which is psychological safety. Indeed. So that's in a way, in this book, I talk about creating a healthy failure culture. It's virtually synonymous with creating a psychologically safe culture. And psychological safety refers to not a comfortable, easy, fun, wonderful environment, but a learning environment. An environment where candor is expected and welcome, risks are expected and welcome because of what's at stake, or because of our commitment to what it is we're trying to do here together.

And so I've talked about building an environment of psychological safety a bunch of the same way where we have to start with framing the work or setting the stage for sort of what we're up against. You know, is it novelty? Is it high stakes? People's lives at risk. Is it a growth and development opportunity? Like just don't assume everybody sees it the same way you do.

Just speak it aloud, even if it seems obvious. I did a deep dive case study research project into the Chilean mine rescue very soon after it was over, back 10 years ago. And the rescue leader, Andres Sugaret, spent endless effort, almost every day, reminding people of why they were there. Because it was really hard work and really uncertain,

and brought far more disappointments than successes on any given day. And he would just routinely be talking about the lives we're trying to save and the importance and the challenge of what we're doing. Now, you would think nobody was there at that site who didn't know why they were there, but literally reminding it, putting it back front of mind turns out to

be a pretty powerful thing to kind of get everybody on the same page to feel good about the risks they're taking and the setbacks they're experiencing. So that is part of psychological safety. Another part and also healthy failure culture is really inviting, being explicit. What should we try next? I'd love to hear from you. Really being explicit and not letting people off the hook, not letting them sit quietly in their comfort zone, but instead saying, need your ideas. We need to try this stuff. We need to make progress. We need to work together to go forward. And then the most important thing about a healthy failure culture and psychological safety is to monitor your response. We talked earlier about stop challenge, choose for your own self-talk. But you have to do that for your responses to others as well. Someone says something to you, you know, that you really

disagree with. It's going to seem obnoxious.. It's gonna seem unwelcome at the very least. If someone brings you bad news, it's going to feel unwelcome right off the bat. Take a breath, pause, and then try to respond in the most thoughtful way you can that's forward facing. So it's, thank you so much for letting me know, right? Which is a true statement. It's not happy talk. It's not fake. It's just, thank you for letting us know. Thank you for letting me know how can I help.

And it's mustering the most productive, learning-oriented response you can, especially to the unexpected, undesired events that happen. I think a lot about creating psychological safety, in part because I did such a poor job at it for so long and was scary to the people. And I think I probably still am a little scary to the people I work with. And so I just love to ask a few more questions about how to make sure I'm doing it correctly and hopefully people can learn from this. Not everybody who's listening is at the top of the food chain in their organization and we should be clear that you can create psychological safety at whatever position you occupy within an organization

but it's perhaps most powerful if you have the most power. So for me one of the things that I've really tried to do is invite feedback and then reward publicly and privately the people who give me feedback, even if and especially if it's hard to hear. Exactly. Practice to invite feedback. You know, be very, very clear and explicit that you want it. And then how do you respond?

You know, and it has to be something that is a little bit of a reward. It's a reward. It's a compliment. It's a moment of appreciation. It's even just listening intently is a reward. So especially when someone is in a position of some power or status, when they are listening intently to you, that's a reward in its own right. So, and then the only other part was the stage setting, which you do in an ongoing way, which is the kind of reminding people that the quality of the work we do together

will be better when we're speaking up, when we're candid, when we're direct. Yeah, the stakes are high. And the rewards are high. Chime in. Yes. I need to hear from you. And the consequences of a lack of psychological safety

can be devastating, not necessarily on my team, because nobody's life hangs in the balance, but in hospitals and in places where people could live or die, it's really important that anybody, no matter where they are on the food chain, feels comfortable to speak up. Tragically, many of the catastrophic failures that I've studied at NASA, in hospitals, in aviation, were preventable. They were almost always preventable had people felt comfortable speaking up or able to speak up. And that in many ways, that's what I've been dedicating my research and some of my writing

too, is how do we make sure that never happens again, right? It's one thing when things really, truly come in out of the blue and no one saw them coming. It's quite another when someone had a worry, but they didn't feel they could mention it, and they weren't confident enough that they were right. Fine, it's okay to not be right. We have to celebrate and reward the boy who cried wolf because if we don't embrace false alarms, let's say people say, okay, I get the message, I'm supposed to speak up, and then they speak up, I think this could be a problem over here. And then we go check it out. And no, it's fine. And it's like, I dismiss you. I'm dismissive because don't you realize that was fine. Well, next time

you're going to think twice. And next time, of course, might be the very moment where you could have prevented a major catastrophe. Yes. You do make a point in the book of arguing, and I agree with this, that there's a role of, there's a potentially pernicious role that societal inequalities can play in all of this, that not everybody, depending on the color of their skin or their gender, has the same permission to A, speak up, and B, take risks? Absolutely. And that's one of those facts of modern life that I would really love to just wipe away with a magic wand.

But unfortunately, I don't have a magic wand. So instead, I write about it. And I think it's important for us to pause to contemplate that. And I talk about it as the unequal license to fail. It's one thing to have lots of happy talk among say Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, largely not always, but largely white men, to sort of say, yeah, failure's a badge of honor.

And I wouldn't want to invest in anyone who hasn't had a failure. And all of that sort of glib and positive talk, which has a really important role, but is incomplete if it's not true for everyone. If the first time a woman or a person of color enters those haunted hallways and have their own failure, and that ends up inadvertently sending the message

that, well, we shouldn't fund someone like that again, or we shouldn't hire someone like that again, then we're in trouble. But unfortunately, there's evidence to suggest that's the case. In part because people feel that they are representing their group, and then they feel less able to take risks because what if I fail, it won't just reflect badly on me. It'll reflect badly on a whole bunch of people like me. A black female friend of mine talks about it as a hidden tax that she has to pay that I don't have to pay, which strikes me as legit. And that's sort of the inverse phrase to the one that is often used, which is unearned privilege. So she pays a tax and I'm certainly, I think being a white female is not a terrible category to be in in terms of privilege, but it's not the same as being a white

male where the unearned privilege is totally invisible in society. This gets to so what can be done about it. And I'll ask you, but my theory is that it's not that any one of us has a magic wand, as you said before, but people like me, and to a lesser extent, like you, who have unearned privilege. I think the job is to kind of wake up to it. And it doesn't have to be showy and all virtue, signally and self-righteous, but just to wake up to it so that you can be aware of the psychodynamics boiling beneath the surface in any given situation to the best of your ability and try to compensate for it to the best of your ability.

So it starts with awareness and it's awareness that should provoke humility, which is it doesn't take away your successes, your accomplishments, but maybe makes us a little bit more humble about, you know, the old will merit. You know, I did it myself. It was my hard work and yes, you worked hard. Absolutely. No one's going to take that away from you. And I sometimes think that with that awareness, and we should expect it comes just a little bit of grieving, right? There's an emotional loss, you know, to realizing that you got a leg up because of where you were born. And that is not, it's not about self-flagellation. It's about becoming okay

with the fact that you had help. That's okay, right? We all have help. I mean, help is good. Help is to be celebrated, not to be denied and made less of. Yeah, I'm trotting at all of my favorite hobby horses today, but the thing I talk a lot with my son, who's also white male, is the thing

that Spider-Man's uncle said to him, which is with great power comes great responsibility and Neither of us can change the wombs we came out of I'm talking about me and my son here And we could be as cognizant as possible of our unearned privilege and try to do our best to remediate Absolutely, you know the unearned privilege I got the primary or one of the primary unearned privileges I got, was I was born into a family where my parents cared deeply about education. They also cared deeply about being kind and generous

to others, but education was sort of job one. Not, I don't want to say but there, but because actually probably kindness was job one and education was job two. But that's something you either are lucky enough to have that just permeate that it's normal and natural to want to work hard and do your homework or that's like for sissies or you know, I mean those cultural messages that become part of who you are. I didn't earn that. That was just the atmosphere I grew up in and it happened to be one that helped me. As is evident by this entire discussion.

Let's wrap up on the note on which you end the book, which is the serenity prayer and specifically the words the wisdom to know the difference. Why is that so important? Well, first of all, I end there because I want to be super clear that everything I write about in the book has fuzzy boundaries. There's very little that's just like, oh, it's an A or a B or an X or a Y. It's I think these are clear and compelling categories and they involve judgment calls. And so I want to end with the necessity of making discernments in our lives. Was that something where I contributed in a problematic way? And can I own that? So discernment, judgment is so, so important. But the wisdom to also appreciate that you are not in charge here. You are not

in charge of the whole universe. You can play your role and play it as best you can. But accepting kind of the the smallness of each of us is freeing in a good way, right? I'm neither responsible for everything bad, nor am I unable to exert an influence on the world. It has to be a right-size recognition of what I can and what I cannot do. To confront, I mean, personally, to really be okay with being a fallible human being and still commit to doing the best I can, I think is what I want readers to take away from it.

Well said, I think I've said that a bunch of times. Not very. Very sloppily said, but it's, you know, I think it's heartfelt. I mean, it's the wisdom to Accept the things we cannot change and to fully commit to changing the things we can change While recognizing that we're not in it alone Were you being a perfectionist when you said that was sloppily said no, I don't think so

I think I meandered a little bit, but it's it's okay, right? That's why I like writing because you know you can edit and edit and edit until it's almost right. We can edit here, so you might be surprised how this comes out on the other end. I didn't hear any sloppiness personally, so. Is there something I should have asked but failed to ask? I don't think so. I mean this was a really interesting conversation for me. I love the connection between the Buddhist teachings and phrases and I think it's a very meaningful connection because my book, my work are ultimately about

thriving as fallible human beings, accepting the setbacks we have to accept, but also preventing as many preventable failures as collectively possible. Yeah, sometimes the psychology, science, the wisdom traditions all spokes lead to the hub, you know, like we're all saying the same stuff. Absolutely. Before I let you go, can you just remind everybody of the name of your book and point out any other resources you've put out into the world that we should know about? Sure, right kind of wrong, the science of failing

well. And the prior book, The Fearless Organization is about psychological safety. If you want to go deeper into that topic, check out amcedmondson.com for more information. topic. Check out amcedmanson.com for more information. AMC Edmondson, thank you very much. A pleasure. Thank you. Thanks again to Amy Edmondson. I did reference in that conversation, the self-compassion work of Dr. Kristin Neff.

If you want to hear a previous episode I did with her, there is a link in the show notes. Thank you for listening, really appreciate that. We could not and would not do this without you. Thanks as well to everybody who works so hard on this show. 10% happier is produced by Gabrielle Zuckerman, Justine Davy, Lauren Smith, and Tara Anderson. DJ Kashmir is our senior producer.

Marissa Schneiderman is our senior editor. Kevin O'Connell is our director of audio and post production, and Kimmy Regler is our executive producer. Alicia Mackey leads our marketing, and Tony Magyar is our director of podcasts. And finally, Nick Thorburn of Islands wrote our theme. If you like 10% happier, I hope you do.

You can listen early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery App or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music. Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at Wondery.com. Welcome to the Happiest Place on Earth, where your happy is everywhere. And you, you're the happiest of them all, because this place has all the happy you never knew could exist, so you're a new kind of happy every time you visit. Welcome to your happiest place on Earth, only at the Disneyland Resort in California. Visit Disneyland.ca for important details subject to availability and change

without notice parking mission and reservation required for park entry. Do you wanna hear about the $100 wedding dress that just saved Abercrombie? Or the tech acquisition that was just like Game of Thrones? Or the one financial equation that can solve climate change? Then check out our daily podcast, The Best One Yet,

or as we call it, T-Boy. This is Nick. This is Jack. And we pick the three most interesting business news stories every day for the perfect mix. 20 minutes each morning, you're gonna feel brighter. We call it pop biz, don't we, Jack? Where pop culture meets business news,

and we've done it for over a thousand episodes. Yeah, Graham, we did the one on Airbnb's party band. They're a party pooper with a purpose. Yeah, remember the one where Airbnb evicted me when we were doing the pod in New York City? episodes. in your morning with us every weekday. Listen to the best one yet on the Wondery app or wherever you get your pot. You can listen to the best one yet, ad free right now on Wondery Plus.