The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett - Adam Grant: The Surprising New Research On Procrastination, Perfectionism & Happiness!

Episode Date: February 12, 2024

Work has to suck, you have to be selfish to get ahead, and you can’t become more original, these are just some of the myths that Adam Grant busts and replaces with an upgraded way to see the world. Adam Grant is Professor of Management and Psychology at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He has been named one of the world’s 10 most influential management thinkers and one of Fortune’s 40 under 40. He is also a #1 New York Times bestselling author of 5 books, including ‘Think Again’, ’Give and Take’, and ‘Originals’. In this conversation Adam and Steven discuss topics, such as why star players ruin teams, how to be original, why character beats genius, and the myths about entrepreneurs and risk. 00:00 Intro 02:00 Finding Happiness Meaning & Success 04:50 Redefining The Game & Changing The Rules About Success 07:20 Who Are More Successful, Givers Or Keepers? 10:25 Taking The Initiative: Great Ideas Need Execution 14:21 What Happens To Procrastinators? 21:37 Who Are The Originals Of Our Time? 22:22 What Are The Characteristics Of Originals 23:48 Why Child Geniuses Won't Become Adult Geniuses 25:09 Being A Perfectionist 27:12 The Importance Of Urgency 33:11 The Importance Of Leaning Into Difficulty 38:21 What Role Trauma Plays In Becoming Successful? 40:56 What Determines What Sibling Will Be More Successful? 48:25 What Makes A Risk Taker? 53:18 What Takes To Build A Great Team 57:38 What Happens To People When You Take Them Out Of Their Team Culture 01:01:33 How To Not Get Complacent If You're Successful 01:06:01 Disagreeing With Your Boss 01:10:09 What Science Says About Group Vs Individual Thinking 01:15:51 Unlocking Your Hidden Potential 01:26:27 Self Promotion Vs Idea Promotion 01:28:41 Think Like A Scientist 01:42:56 Last Guest Question You can access The Athletic article, ‘Does Cristiano Ronaldo make teams better or worse?’, here: https://bit.ly/3SWnckE You can purchase Adam’s book, ‘Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things’, here: https://amzn.to/3SQ2rH8 Follow Adam Twitter - https://bit.ly/3OEdq45 Instagram - https://bit.ly/3UveeMg YouTube - https://bit.ly/4bpaAtg Watch the episodes on Youtube - https://g2ul0.app.link/3kxINCANKsb My new book! 'The 33 Laws Of Business & Life' is out now - https://smarturl.it/DOACbook Follow me: https://beacons.ai/diaryofaceo Sponsors:  Huel: https://g2ul0.app.link/G4RjcdKNKsb Linkedin Jobs: https://www.linkedin.com/doac

Quick one. Just wanted to say a big thank you to three people very quickly. First people I want to say thank you to is all of you that listen to the show. Never in my wildest dreams is all I can say. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I'd start a podcast in my kitchen and that it would expand all over the world as it has done. And we've now opened our first studio in America, thanks to my very helpful team led by Jack on the production side of things. So thank you to Jack and the team for building out the new American studio. And thirdly to to Amazon Music, who when they heard that we were expanding to the United States, and I'd be recording a lot more over in the States, they put a massive billboard in Times Square for the show. So thank you so much, Amazon Music. Thank you to our team. And

thank you to all of you that listened to this show. Let's continue. Ronaldo is an individual superstar, but the way he plays his game does not elevate the team. So what can we learn from this? First of all, Adam Grant. Business psychologist. One of the world's most influential career and business thinkers. He will help you do the best work of your life and reach your professional potential. My job is to study how to make work not suck and help you become a better version of yourself.

So what are some of the myths and findings about unlocking our hidden potential? These might surprise people. It turns out that perfectionism is not all it's cracked up to be. It's a risk factor for burnout. First-borns score higher on IQ tests, but later-borns tend to be more willing to take risks. We don't procrastinate for the reasons we think we do.

It's not hard work that you're avoiding when you procrastinate. It is decades of research on brainstorming has shown that if you get a group of people together to generate ideas, if instead you would let them work alone, you would have gotten more ideas and also better ideas. When people talk about imposter syndrome,

that feeling is actually pretty rare. What's much more common is imposter thoughts, but there are all kinds of benefits of having those thoughts. For example, data from 50,000 people found that Chrome orfox users are on average better performers and they stick around longer than if you're using safari or internet explorer give me one more okay well this is the most vital skill to unlock the hidden potential of yourself

so what you have to do is before we wrap i have a couple questions for you i thought why do i feel nervous you should feel nervous first question is what's something i can do better as a podcast guest oh gosh quick one before this episode starts about 75 percent of people that listen to this podcast on audio platforms spotify and apple haven't yet hit the follow button if i could ask a favor from you if you've ever enjoyed this podcast please could you just go and hit that follow button on your app it helps this show more than I could possibly say and the bigger the show gets, the better the guests get. Thank you and enjoy this conversation. Adam, at the very essence of your work, what is it you are trying to do, teach, or give people? I want to give people the most useful insights from social science to help them think more

clearly and critically and make choices that will build happiness and meaning and success. And if you think about your career over the last couple of decades, what points of inspiration have you pulled from to give you as an idea of your sort of academic and experience profile that has pulled into all of this work, all of these books that sit in front of me now? So I'm an organizational psychologist by training. That means my job is to study how to make work not suck, which sometimes is a tall order. But I'm interested in how we find meaning and motivation, how we can lead more generous and creative and curious lives. We were talking earlier about the books that you've

written. This particular book in front of me here, Originals, one of my team members, Grace Miller, she went around our office and gave a copy of this book to everybody. And she wrote a personalized note inside. When you use this word Originals, you yourself are an original in many respects. I had a read through your earliest years and it was quite clear to me that you were different in several ways. Throwing that question back at you, you know, I've got this photo here, actually. My team printed off for me. Yeah. I was seven years old

and I was obsessed with Nintendo. And I think there must have been a Saturday where I must have played for seven or eight hours straight. And then I got really frustrated when I didn't beat the game. And my mom said, these video games are just like turning my happy kid into a gremlin. And I'm worried that they're frying his brain. And she called the local newspaper and said, you should do a story about how video games are hurting kids. And they said, you're right. And we want to profile your child. So here I am with a lot of hair and no teeth, just hooked on a video game. And, you know,

what's funny about this is if you read the research on the effects of video games, it turns out that most of the benefits outweigh the costs. That kids who play video games even a few hours a day end up with more self-control, better working memory, more grit and self-discipline because they're constantly having to face and overcome challenges and build their resilience. And there are even some possible mental health benefits. So video games were not the devil, as my mom thought. It's funny because when I was reading about those early years where you seem to be quite obsessive when faced with a variety of different challenges, it did feel like you're someone that's committed

their life to trying to beat the game first by understanding the game and then understanding the levers you need to pull to to beat the game is that like an accurate assessment that's fascinating i never thought about it that way i think that that's been a huge part of my motivation but i think at some point i got dissatisfied with the idea of beating the game and i wanted to try to make the game better interesting i think maybe to take a specific example, um, I remember, so I, I had, I had a moment in, gosh, it was 2011. Uh, I found out I got tenure and, uh, so, you know, essentially a job for life at, at my university. And the question is now what? You can keep just doing research and teaching classes. And a group of students sat me down and said, you should write a book because you should make your knowledge accessible to people who aren't in your class. And I felt like I didn't have anything to say. And I was passionate about teaching other people's ideas.

And they said, no, your research has influenced us. And we want you to make that more widely available. And I think at some point it hit me that what they were asking me to do was to try to redefine the game. That at the time, I think the lesson I was trying to teach them was you do not have to be a selfish taker to succeed. And actually, I'd done a bunch of research showing that people who are givers, who were happy to help others with no strings attached

in the long run, actually outperformed expectations. And my students said to me, look, what you've taught us is we don't have to, you know, kind of take a me first competitive attitude all the time, achieve a lot of success and then start giving back. We can be sharing our knowledge. We can be making introductions to try to help people connect and expand their networks. We can be giving others feedback and solving problems for them. And that can actually contribute to our success. You got to get that message out there. And so, you know, making the case that it might be better to be a giver than a taker was my first attempt to change the way we define the game and really the way we think about the rules

of success. And that's kind of been my mission as an author ever since to ask, what are we getting wrong in the way that we try to play the game and how do we shift it? I want to talk about that. And I'm a Manchester United fan. And I was thinking, I've been debating my friends in our Manchester United chat for the last two years about Cristiano Ronaldo. And we have two contingents in the group. And this is to your point about giving and taking. We have the one contingent who think that he was tremendously beneficial to Manchester United and really any team that he touches. And then you have me, who believes that on balance, when you look at the stats, he actually has a net negative impact on the team because he takes more than he

gives. And then in reading your book, you use the word Ronaldo. So I feel like this is a wonderful opportunity to ask you about that and what your thoughts are on those kinds of sort of self-centered individuals in teams. Yeah, it's such a fascinating dynamic. So I'm not a Ronaldo expert, but the way that he carries himself and the way he plays his game does not scream giver to me. And I think the best evidence I've seen that speaks to this is a study of NBA basketball teams. So there are obviously some differences between basketball and football. But I think one of the commonalities is you have high interdependence, where the team really depends on every player to play a critical role. And what you see in the NBA data is that if teams have more selfish takers on the team, more narcissists, they actually fail to improve over the course of the season. You end up having a ball hog who doesn't elevate the team. And that's

especially true if the biggest star or somebody in the core role is very self-centered. And so I think based on that evidence, there's a case to be made that Ronaldo is basically, you know, he's an individual superstar, but he's not making other people better. And I think the most meaningful way to succeed is to help other people succeed. I think a true leader, I think Messi is more like this, is somebody who asks, how can I make everybody around me more effective? I'm going to have to say I agree. Do you? Yeah, I do agree. And I spent some time looking at the numbers and I credit The Athletic

as well for doing a piece called The Ronaldo Effect where they looked at every team he had joined since he was at Real Madrid and every single team according to the data, and I'm kind of paraphrasing here, I'll put a link in the description below to the article I'm referring to, had fallen in performance when he joined

post his Real Madrid days, which means he went from Juventus and all these clubs and they've all gotten worse. He's actually gone out now to play in the Middle East, and that club was top of the league when he joined. They're now second in the league, and they had a six-point lead when he joined. So I think it speaks to something about this idea of giving and taking for optimal team performance. But Ronaldo, in many respects, is an original. Yeah, it's hard to argue with that. You know what I mean?

I mean, look, some of the things he can do on a field, you just wouldn't expect a human being to be able to pull it off. So there's definitely extraordinary skill and I think improvisational creativity there. But yeah, we can ask some questions about is that ultimately in service of the team? What is when you wrote this book and called it originals? What did you mean by an original? How do you define that? I think about originals as people who don't just question the

way we've always done it, but actually take the initiative to create a better way. So it's not just about having a new idea. It's about taking action to create change. And I think that's so important because I think it's often said that ideation without execution is just hallucination. There's so many people who dream up interesting ideas but never do anything about them. And actually, I'll give you a personal example.

When I was in university, I had a roommate. This is 2000, who had an idea for a social network. And he said, what if we could build like an online yearbook where everybody had access to each other's profiles and they could communicate and they could plan parties? And he stayed up all night coding it and actually building the basics of the platform. And then he never followed through and never did anything with it. He stayed up all night coding it and actually building the basics of the platform. And then he never followed through and never did anything with it. And then a few years later, Mark Zuckerberg starts Facebook in the house next door. And I could look at that and say, my roommate was an idiot.

Why didn't he do anything about it? But guess what? I missed that same opportunity. 1999, I co-founded what was called the first online social network on our campus. And it was an e-group of, we had connected about an eighth of our entering college freshman class before we got to campus. And we were all exchanging messages and connecting. And then we got to campus and we shut it down because we said, we all live in the same town now. Why do we need an online community? And so I made the same mistake. I was part of a group of people that had a very original idea

and we did not execute it. So the difference is execution though. I think it's the biggest difference. And what does it take for someone to be an executioner? I hope no one becomes an executioner, but maybe an executor would work. I think it's not what I thought. I think I assumed that you had to be somebody who was always the first mover. That if you didn't act on the social network idea in those first few years, it was going to be too late. But as I think you know this already, Stephen, but I was surprised to find that some of the best originals are actually procrastinators, that they don't rush in. They wait for their best idea as opposed to

just immediately implementing their first idea. And of course, they're testing and iterating and experimenting along the way. But I, well, let's go back to my Nintendo days here. I've felt like I'm not an original thinker for a long time. And one day I had a PhD student, Jihei Shin, who came to my office and said, you know, I actually think that procrastinating can make you more creative. And Jihei is incredibly creative and I didn't believe her. I was like, no, this can't be true. And she said, really, I have my most creative ideas when I'm procrastinating. And I didn't believe it because I guess I've always been what psychologists call a pre-crastinator, which is somebody who the moment you have an idea, you want to immediately put it into practice.

And so I, you know, I was always excited to get things done early. And I was, I was proud of being a good finisher. And Jihei said, you know, I actually think that's a mistake. And I challenged her to test it. And so she went out and studied people in various jobs and had them actually fill out a survey on how often they procrastinate. And then their supervisors rated their creativity. And then we ran some experiments together where we tempted people to procrastinate by putting different numbers of funny YouTube videos available while they were supposed to be doing creative tasks. And then we got their creativity scored by experts. And lo and behold, it turned out that people who procrastinate a little bit are more creative than people who pre-procrastinate like me. What's your conclusion as to why?

Well, we had a few hunches at first that we tested. Well, the first thing I wanted to know is what happened to the people who always procrastinated? And Jihei was like, I don't know, they never filled out my survey. No, they did eventually fill out the survey and they were also less creative. So both extremes were bad. If you never procrastinate, if you always procrastinate, you are less creative than if you sometimes do, or if you do a little. And what we found is there are a couple of mechanisms at play. One is that procrastination can lead you to incubate ideas in the back of your mind. So you have time to connect the dots, see patterns you didn't see before. Another is that you end up getting some distance from the

problem and that allows you to reframe it and look at it from a broader perspective. And so what was interesting in the data though, was that procrastination only boosted creativity if you were intrinsically motivated by the problem. So if you were putting it off because you were bored or you didn't care, then it didn't stay active in the back of your mind. But if you were putting it off because you were stuck and you hadn't care, then it didn't stay active in the back of your mind. But if you were putting it off because you were stuck and you hadn't figured it out yet, or you were being patient and you wanted to have 10 or 12 more ideas before you decided which one to pursue, then you actually got a creative boost. So interesting. And I really relate to it because-

Do you? Yeah, 100% relate to it. Are you a moderate procrastinator? Yes. 100%. 100%. I think this is important to say because I think sometimes people think that because do you yeah 100 are you a moderate procrastinator yes a hundred percent a hundred percent i think this is important to say because i think sometimes people think that i get a lot of messages from people saying um steve i'm procrastinating so much how do you not procrastinate and i always look at that and say like i'm not the guy to tell you how to do that because procrastination in my mind is a bit of a tool um as you said there's different types of

procrastination that i notice myself doing. One of them is when I get stuck on something and I find myself picking up my phone as if I'm a man possessed. I literally, what I'll do is I'll be in the middle of work and then the next thing I'm on Instagram. And I'm like, how did that happen? Oh yeah, because the part in this piece of work you got to is psychologically difficult for some reason. I don't feel prepared or whatever. And then the other thing I noticed myself procrastinating on is just when I'm thinking through something, I'll end up just walking around the house. I'll end up cleaning, doing the dishes or whatever, and then coming back to the piece of work later.

But I would say that I'm definitely a procrastinator. That's so interesting. And I think, let's be clear, I'm not encouraging people to procrastinate more. That's not the goal here. The goal is just to normalize procrastination and say, it's a natural part of the creative process. Everybody does it sometimes. And even though you expect it to be counterproductive, in certain situations, it can actually lead you to better ideas. And I think there's maybe a myth worth busting here. Research led by Fuchsia Sirwa has shown that we don't procrastinate for the reasons we think we do. So a lot of people think I'm being lazy. I'm avoiding effort. What's wrong with me? Why don't I want to work hard? But it turns out

it's not hard work that you're avoiding when you procrastinate. It's negative emotions, unpleasant feelings. You are avoiding a set of tasks that makes you feel frustrated, confused, bored, anxious. A lot of procrastination is driven by fear. I don't know if I can do this. I'm not sure if I'm up to the challenge. And so I put it off. And I think one of the best ways to manage that is to ask, what are the tasks that you consistently procrastinate on? What negative emotions are they stirring up? And then how do you change those? What do you procrastinate on?

I procrastinate a lot on editing, actually, and revising. I love rough drafting. It feels very creative for me. It's fun to figure out what does the best evidence say? How do I tell the story that brings the evidence to life? And then the process of tinkering to get each sentence just right, it bores me. And so I put it off and I had to figure out how do I make that more interesting in order to stop procrastinating altogether on it. And how did you do that?

Well, one of the, one of the things I did was, uh, one of my goals, uh, in, in my recent writing was to, to try to get less abstract and more concrete. And so what I started doing was I started rewriting paragraphs in the voices of my favorite fiction authors, which was such a fun experiment. So how would Stephen King write this paragraph? How would Maggie Smith, an amazing poet, how would she write these sentences? And that made it a creative exercise again. As I was doing my research ahead of this conversation, I was watching your TED Talk, and one of the things that really stood out to me in your TED Talk was when you start talking about internet browsers.

I immediately checked which browser I was using, and I was using Google Chrome. There you go. But you make the case that people, you can tell someone's, I guess, creativity? I'm paraphrasing, I'm putting words in your mouth here, by which internet browser they use. And there was a really important message in there for me. So can you tell me about that? Exactly what the findings can tell us?

Yeah, I was sitting at a conference that helped to organize and this researcher, Michael Hausman, is giving a presentation. He's got data from 50,000 people. And he knows they're filling out a survey, and then he's tracking their job performance. Huge range of jobs. And he knows what web browser they're on. It's one of the automatically collected data points. And he's like, I wonder if there's anything there. And he finds that he can predict your job performance and also your likelihood of staying in your job from which web browser you're using. This is so weird. And he stood up and he said, I don't know what's going on here.

But it turns out that Chrome and Firefox users are on average better performers and they stick around longer than if you're using Safari or Internet Explorer. And immediately, I had a hunch. I'd been studying initiative and proactivity and being an original thinker. And what hit me was Internet Explorer and Safari are the defaults. They came pre-installed on your phone or your computer. In order to get Chrome or Firefox, you had to question the default and say, huh, I wonder if there's a better browser and take a little bit of initiative. And so I started proposing this and people are like, great. So if I download a better browser,

I'm going to be better at my job. No, no, it's not about the browser. It's about the resourcefulness to say, you want to be the kind of person who questions the default and asks if there's a better way. And I think what happens is in people's jobs, I've gone on to study this with some colleagues, the kind of person who upgrades their browser is also the kind of person who asks,

is there a more creative way to do my job? Can I reinvent the way that we work together? And that ultimately not only makes you better at your job, it also helps you create a job that you want to stay in. It makes sense. And so on an ongoing basis, I'm only going to hire people who have Mozilla Firefox or Chrome installed in their browser. It should be an interview question. I don't know if I would go that far. No, you said it. So I think it's a fun question to say, okay, how did you, like, let's not limit it to the browser, but talk to me about how you've challenged the status quo in the past. Yeah, that's a really good question. When we think about originals, who are the sort of landmark originals of our time in your mind?

What domain do we want to talk about? Are we talking tech and business? Tech and business. Let's go for that. I mean, it's hard not to put Elon Musk on that list. You can love him or hate him. But when it comes to, you know, dreaming up the vision and also taking the initiative then to try to make us a, you know, a multi-planetary species with SpaceX and build reusable rockets, which, you know, NASA had never really thought to do, you know, moving us into an all-electric car future. You know, I think there are a lot of things to complain about with Elon's leadership and decision-making and the way he communicates on the platform formerly known as Twitter,

but I think he's an original, no doubt about it. How does he fit your profile of an original? I think he fits first and foremost because he challenges the status quo, would be the beginning. And then secondly, I think he's relentless in trying to make his vision a reality, which is, I think, something that's driving some of his former fans crazy right now. Some people might say, well, he was like a child prodigy or he was a child genius. So that's why he's so great. Do you agree with that statement or do you dispute it?

I think it's hard to say in his case. I think my job as a social scientist is to ask, what does the evidence tell us about child prodigies? And it turns out we overestimate them in a lot of cases because once something comes naturally to you, you often have a hard time thinking about it in original ways. So you see kids, for example, who can play a Mozart sonata at age four and they drill over and over again and they're amazingly fast learners.

And practice does make perfect, but it doesn't make new. They don't learn how to write their own original scores. They don't get experienced with failure, with trial and error. And so they don't take enough risks to figure out, how do I invent something that's never existed before? That's not true in every case, but it is empirically true that most child prodigies do not become known as adult geniuses. And I think that's in part because they don't learn to stretch their creative muscles. Because they're overwhelmingly talented, so they don't need to put in the hard graft that others do, and they don't need to fight for new information in the same way that others do?

In some cases, they get rewarded over and over again for basically just mastering the way everyone else has always done it. And so they don't learn to break free from the mold. These adult geniuses then, what is it that they have that child prodigies don't? Well, a lot of it is what I've come to think of as character skills, which is a set of capabilities to put your principles into practice. So they're often people with hidden potential. They may not be naturals at first. They could be underdogs or late bloomers or slow learners, but they are obsessive about making themselves uncomfortable, saying, if I only play to my strengths, then I'm never stretching myself and I'm not taking on enough new challenges.

There's a bunch of research to suggest they're like sponges. They're soaking up lots of information and then trying to filter what's helpful in and then kind of rule out what's harmful. And what I've come to think of as imperfectionists, which is they're really careful and disciplined about saying, when is it important to aim for the best and when is it important to aim for the best? And when is it okay to look for good enough? Perfectionism is a topic people talk about a lot. And I think everybody, it seems to me that everybody wants to be considered a perfectionist,

as if being a perfectionist is better. Because what does that say about my values? It means that I really care about things being great. It therefore means by way of that, that I think I produce great things. And saying you're a perfectionist is almost like saying I make great work. But you're saying that being, there are often times where it's better to be an imperfectionist, that the judgment of knowing when something is good enough.

Yeah, I think you're onto something here. So when you have to answer that annoying job interview question, what's your greatest weakness? It's everyone's favorite answer. I'm too much of a perfectionist. It's like Michael Scott from the American office. Like I have weaknesses as a leader. I work too hard and I care too much. And yeah, people do think that perfectionism is, you know, ultimately more of an asset than a liability. And that's why they try to get away with that in the weakness question. But the evidence tells a really different story.

Research led by Tom Curran here in the UK shows that perfectionism is not all it's cracked up to be. It's a risk factor for burnout. It also, if you look at the best evidence available, perfectionists do get better grades in school, but they don't actually perform any better in their jobs. Why? I think the jury's still out, but my hunch based on the evidence that's been gathered so far is that perfectionists are good at school

because they know exactly what's going to be on the test. And so they can cram and memorize until they're prepared to ace the material. The real world is much more ambiguous. You don't know exactly what's going to show up in your performance review. It's not entirely clear what work is going to be valued. And perfectionists are terrified of failure. They don't want any flaws. They don't want any defects. They want to avoid every mistake. And so they don't take enough risks. They focus very narrowly on the things they know they can excel at, and they don't end up growing and evolving and improving enough. I wondered if urgency has a relationship

with this as well, because in order to be successful in the real world, you have to be somewhat urgent, which means sometimes you have to say, that's good enough. Let's go. Let's move. Let's move. And I guess a perfectionist would, if left to their own devices, would try and slow time down so that they could focus more on this thing right now. They'd probably never ship that social network. They'd probably still be in their bedroom in America somewhere working on it. Whereas Zuckerberg made a thing that was good enough and shipped it, then learned from that. And the iterative process of making something better is probably more conducive with success than just, you know, the lean startup talks about this a lot, like get it out there and learn from it versus just

incubating it forever. Yeah, this is, I think, a key Eric Ries point. And it's been backed up by a bunch of, ironically, experiments showing that founders who experiment more end up being more successful because they're able to pivot faster when something doesn't work. And they get lots of market feedback and signals on what's going to be successful and what isn't. And I know you've lived that. But it's interesting that you point this out because this is a lesson I learned firsthand during my days as an attempted athlete. So after being too short for basketball and too slow for football, I stumbled onto springboard diving. And by the way, I had no business being a springboard diver. I was afraid of heights. And also my teammates nicknamed me Frankenstein because I was so stiff.

But I really loved it and I wanted to get better at it. And I was a perfectionist and I thought that was going to help me because in diving, you're supposed to get perfect tense. Well, guess what? I have my most basic dive, a front dive pike. You just jump up, touch your toes, go in head first. I wanted to work on perfecting that all practice. And I was working on these tiny little adjustments that would take me from a six and a half to a seven and not ever learning harder dives and failing to raise my degree of difficulty. And that really stunted my growth as a diver until one day my coach, Eric Best, pulled me aside and he said, you know, Adam, there's no such thing as a perfect 10. And I was like, wait, have the Olympic announcers been lying to me when they say a dive was done for perfect 10s? What's going on here? And he said, if you look at the rule book, a 10 is for excellence. There's no such realistic goal for each dive. So for front dive, we started aiming for sevens. And I would want to do 30 of them in practice.

And when I did my third one and Eric said that was a seven, it's time to move on. When I was learning a much more complicated front two and a half with a full twist, you do two flips, 360 turn, and then a dive. The first goal was we want to do this for twos. We just want to make it. And then I got a little better at it and we started aiming for fours and fives on it. And Steve, I have to tell you, this has been one of the most useful lessons I've learned in my career is when I start a project, whether it's a book or a podcast season, or I'm writing an op-ed,

the first thing I do is I ask, what is my target score here? And for a book, it's a nine because I'm going to pour two years of my work life into this. And I hope a lot of people will read it and it's going to be useful to them. So it really matters to do it about as well as I can. When I'm writing a post for Instagram, I'm pretty content with a six and a half. Just above getting canceled is my target there. But that calibration is helpful because I could spend all day crafting that Instagram post and then I'll never get anything done.

When you're thinking about what's good enough through that framework, is part of the equation the return on time spent? Because I'm thinking about the Instagram quote, like if you have a 10 out of 10 Instagram quote, what's the return on that versus a 10 out of 10 book, which can completely, as we've seen, change someone's entire life.

Like a 10 out of 10 TED Talk, you have a phenomenal TED Talk, I think it's got tens of millions of views, and that can change your entire life in a way that any Instagram quote, I've had some banging Instagram quotes. I got a couple of viral ones. And what ends up happening

is everyone just copies what you said and just posts it. And it never really does anything for you. But a 10 out of 10 TED talk like you've got or 10 out of 10 books, like exceptional books can change your whole life. So maybe part of the equation is to think about the potential reward

from the investment. I think that's such a powerful way to frame it. Well, let me react to a couple of things. First of all, I don't take tens. So you're being overly generous here. And I always want to know what can I do to get a little bit closer to 10. But I think thinking about the return on effort is really valuable. And I think about that less in terms of what's the immediate reward for me and more in terms of how can I have the greatest impact for the investment of my time? And I think you're right. You know, like Instagram is a, it's a quick hit of dopamine and it feels really great when you get a lot of likes and, you know, enthusiastic comments on a post and then it fades really fast. And like, I don't know. I mean, people, when I first became an author, people said, you know,

well, the pen is mightier than the sword. And, you know, of course, ideas, you have to be in that world. I don't know if the pen is actually mightier than the sword. I do know that the ink lasts and that, you know, people ask questions about a book that I wrote a decade ago. Nobody asked me about my social media posts from several years ago. And I think podcasting actually lives somewhere in between, right? When we talk, sometimes ideas stick. Actually, there's some evidence that audio is more memorable and more intimate than what you pick up on the page. But I think it's a little more fleeting. I don't remember a conversation I listened to from a few years ago the same way I remember a book that changed my worldview. And so I put a little bit more into writing than I do into

talking. So interesting. I want to talk to you as well about something you mentioned earlier, which was this idea of doing difficult things. You mentioned it in passing. And the question that was stored in my brain is, what is it that makes a certain type of person choose and lean into difficulty and a certain type of person lean out of it? Because that appears to be one of the key sort of correlating factors with success in life, your ability to choose discomfort. Yeah. Yeah. I think this is, this is such a vital skill and I want to, I want to be really clear to say it's a skill, right? It's not just a personality trait. Yeah, you know, some people are born with a little extra,

maybe you could say reserve of willpower, or they have the discipline or the grit or the resilience, and it comes naturally to them. But this is very much a learned skill. And I think the clearest demonstration of this for me is in the marshmallow test, which has been wildly misunderstood in the last few years. So you're familiar probably with the classic demonstration that Walter Mischel did with his colleagues, where you take four-year-olds, you put a marshmallow in front of them,

and you say, you can have one now, but if you're willing to wait until I come back, then you can have two. And then the original finding is that if the longer you can delay gratification, if a kid can wait 10 or 15 minutes for the extra marshmallow, the better they score on a standardized test like the SAT. A decade later, the better grades they get in school. There are all kinds of benefits of this delay gratification scale. Well, in psychology recently, there's been a controversy about whether it replicates. And some of the replications have shown that if you have a lower socioeconomic status, you struggle with the marshmallow test. It's really disappointing, but it's not at all surprising. And in fact, that was part of the original research, is if you grew up in a world

of scarcity, and I know you can relate to this from your own lived experience, you could not afford to wait for the second marshmallow. It might never come. You didn't know if you could trust the research team to come in and bring you one. And so you didn't have the chance to practice that skill and learn the habit. But what's really interesting is if you watch kids who crush the marshmallow test, it's more skill power than willpower. What they have are simple strategies that actually make the temptation less tempting. So you see one kid will actually sit on, he sits on his hands. So that he's, it's a little slower for him to reach out to the marshmallow.

Another covers her eyes so she doesn't have to look at it. And then there's one kid who actually smush so she doesn't have to look at it. And then there's one kid who actually smushes it into a ball and starts bouncing it. So you don't want to eat that anymore. And this is why I say it's a set of skills, not just a matter of will, because if you have techniques for making discomfort less uncomfortable, and you know how to get it, I guess if you know how to get comfortable being uncomfortable, then you are willing to go into many situations where you're a little bit out of your depth and say, yeah, this might be awkward. This might be embarrassing, but I'm going to learn something. And I guess for me, that was public speaking.

You touched on giving TED Talks earlier. I would have never dreamed of standing in a red circle. I had no business whatsoever giving a TED Talk. I'm an introvert. I'm extremely shy. I was terrified of public speaking. And in one of my first lectures, a student wrote in feedback afterward

that I was so nervous, I was causing them to physically shake in their seats. And the only way for me to get over that was to put myself continually in that situation and get used to the discomfort. Is that really the key here? Because I'm just thinking as you're speaking about the people who I look up to, like even like a David Goggins, who just seemed to be able to hold themselves in discomfort more than anybody else. I mean, a friend of mine called Russ is running the entire length of Africa at the moment, from the bottom to the top of Africa,

he's running it. He's doing like two marathons a day, you know, most days. And I'm thinking, are these people just like superhumans that were born with this switch in their brain that I have to, I can only turn on if I have some kind of traumatic incident? Or is it, does the evidence support the fact that this is a learned skill? I think everything that matters in life is always a complex interaction of nature and nurture. But I think we underestimate the power of nurture in these situations. So Goggins is a great example. I mean, he's a machine. Was he always that way? No. His whole story is about, you know, feeling like he was vulnerable and wanting to become somebody where no one could hurt him, right? And I think when psychologists study that, my favorite theory is probably called the theory of learned industriousness, which is a mouthful.

But what it's about is the idea that if you reward effort, if you reward hard work, if you reward seeking out discomfort, then over time, being in uncomfortable situations starts to take on secondary reward properties. In other words, you get a little bit of Pavlovian conditioning, where when you've pushed yourself a little bit past where you're comfortable, that feels good. And you're used to that leading to something positive. And that can become sort of a self reinforcing cycle. I was thinking, as you're saying that about the role trauma plays in people becoming successful. And if we take on this idea that those that push themselves forward and then get rewarded for it are more likely to repeat that behavior, the question should probably become, who are the people that got the greatest reward from pushing themselves

out of their zone of comfort? In my mind, for you to want to push yourself out of a situation, the situation's probably not great. And I was thinking about Goggins there, what he had to do. And many people that I sat on this podcast and speak to, it appears to be the case a lot of time, that there was something traumatic or difficult going on in their home life with their parents, maybe, that forced them or pushed them to pursue something out of their zone of comfort. It actually often pushes them off the road most frequently traveled, and they become like an

original because they went through the shrubs and the prickly bushes. Is there evidence to support that it is helpful in becoming an original? So it's complicated because I think in a lot of the examples we look at, there's a survivorship bias. We see the people who managed to overcome adversity. We don't see all the people who are broken by it. And so we always have to pause and ask,

is this causal? Or is it just revealing that certain people who happen to face adversity and were able to take something out of that, you know, were growing from that? I do think what we know is that resilience is underestimated as a general rule. So if you look at, for example, rates of post-traumatic stress disorder, they are lower when people go through trauma than people's reports of post-traumatic growth saying, look, I wouldn't wish this on myself or anyone else. It was a terrible experience, but I had to grow from it and it made me better or stronger in some way. That's more common than being completely paralyzed or shattered by traumatic experiences.

I think the other thing we know is that resilience is not an individual skill. It's not a muscle you work on just by yourself. It requires a support system, which I think of as scaffolding, a temporary structure that helps you scale a height you couldn't reach on your own. And I think a lot of what that looks like is having a parent, a mentor, a coach who believes in your potential, you discuss how that can be consequential in my relationship with risk and convention and all of those things. What does the data say about siblings and how the order in which they're born can determine their character skills? Okay, we need a giant disclaimer on this. The science of birth order is a mess.

It's full of conflicting findings. A lot of the world's leading experts don't agree on the patterns. And what I'm going to tell you is I think there are two patterns that have very consistent evidence across large samples and rigorous studies, but they are tiny effects, tiny. So they don't say anything about you and your future possibilities. They're patterns across very, very big samples. So let me start with the bad news for you, Steve, which is on average, firstborns score slightly higher in IQ tests

than their younger siblings. Agree to disagree. I'm joking. You're welcome to disagree on that. I'm joking, I'm joking. That does make sense. The major mechanism that seems to explain it is what's called the Tudor effect,

which is if you're the firstborn and you have younger siblings, you end up teaching them a lot. And when you explain things, you remember them better and you understand them better. The best way to learn something is to teach it. And the lastborn doesn't have a younger sibling to teach.

And so sometimes they just miss out on that opportunity. Tiny, tiny difference on average. You will find many brilliant later borns, many average intelligence first borns. So don't take anything from that. But it's an interesting finding. To the point that you raised, the other finding is that later borns tend to be more willing to take risks and become originals. And actually, my favorite example of this comes from research Frank Soloway did on sports. So this is a study of every pair of brothers who ever played Major League Baseball. So you've got two siblings, same family, same parents, same upbringing.

They both make it to the pros. Actually, sometimes there's even a trio. And the question is, which brother takes more risks when it comes to stealing a base? Which, you know, in American baseball is one of the riskiest things you can do because it's very easy to get out. Because you have to basically outrun a ball that's flying in the air. And you have to outsmart a pitcher and a guy who's ready to catch the ball. And it turns out that the later borns are much more likely to take those risks. They're more likely to try to steal a base, and they are also more likely to succeed in stealing a base.

So you're a last born. Why? Where does this penchant for risk-taking come from? What's your hunch about the mechanisms? Oh, gosh. Oh, I know what it is. I know what it is because I saw it in your writing and I was like, that's it. It's my parents gave me way more freedom. When I was 10 years old, and I say this a lot, but when I was 10 years old, if I left the house and I didn't come home for two days, there was no consequences. Whereas I watched my sister try that when she was that same age and it was like, we would call the police. If she wasn't home before like was like we would call the police if she wasn't if she wasn't home before like 10 would call the police and as they went through the cycle of having kids and they got to the fourth one it was almost like I say this also it was like they assumed I was the age of the others and they assumed that their job of parenting had been done and that's what I attribute

it to because in that independence in that void you can start to experiment and you can start to learn and take risks and then you get the feedback from those experiments, which for me was starting businesses at 12, 13, 14, first kid in our family to not go to university. So it, yeah, it made a lot of sense when I read about it. And I also do believe that my, all my siblings have a higher IQ than me. I think if we did an IQ test, I think every one of my siblings would beat me on it. And I think they would all agree. My brothers, my brothers are geniuses compared to me. Jason works, Jason, my, my, the sibling, that's a year older than me, um, went to two of the best universities, et cetera. He's a genius. He's much smarter than I am, but he will even say that what he learned from me was risk. He says

this, he said it this Christmas. He was like, when you came to my house at, um, when I was 18 and I slept on his sofa, he goes, he was in a university. He was off to get a really, really great job as like an actuary. He had gone to the London School of Economics to study that. And I was this dropout sleeping on his sofa because I'd stopped by London. And he said to me at Christmas, he was like, the fact that you weren't concerned about your future inspired me, which ultimately led him to quit his job in the city. He was like, I learned from you risk-taking.

Wow. And yeah. So that's amazing because you benefited from extra freedom and independence. And then you were able to actually pay that back to an older brother. Yeah. I think for me, that's also the most compelling reason why later-borns end up taking more risks and trying new things. There is another theory that has some support that I think might be an additional piece of the story, which is usually the firstborn

ends up sort of impressing parents by being a conventional achiever. And then the thinking is that that niche is filled. And as a later- born, you got to find a way to stand out. Like, well, getting good grades in school is not going to differentiate me from my older siblings. They're always going to be ahead of me. So let me try something that's a little bit road less traveled. Well, I completely relate to that as well. Risk-taking.

It is often believed that risk-taking is a key factor in what makes entrepreneurs successful in their life. But your research and your work in Originals in chapter one, page 17, kind of starts to debunk that myth in, I think, a really liberating way. This is good news for me as somebody who's not a big risk taker. It turns out that risk takers are more likely to become entrepreneurs, but the most successful entrepreneurs don't love risk. They take cautious risks, and they're constantly trying to figure out how to reduce the downside and increase the upside. You know, I guess this goes in two directions.

One direction is to say, if you never take a risk, that's actually a risky way to live your life. It's like building a stock portfolio where you only invest in safe, predictable mutual funds. No, you need a balanced portfolio. You're actually safer if you have some risky investments and some more cautious investments. And I think life is like that too. I think on the other side of that though, you don't want to just be throwing caution to the wind and making a bunch of dumb bets. What you want to do is you want to figure out what's the probability of this unproven idea succeeding, and then do whatever you can to raise those odds. Interesting.

Because that's not the story we hear in the movies. And I guess that's part because we want to frame ourselves as heroes when we tell our own story. And so framing oneself as a hero involves showing a huge, courageous risk you took. Whereas really, I think you're saying if you zoom in, you'll see how the best entrepreneurs protected their downside of that risk. Yeah, I think that's critical. So let's go back to Elon as an example. I had dinner with him a few years ago, sort of interested in what, what can we learn from, from what's worked for him? And then also what hasn't. And I was talking to him about risk-taking and he, you know, he was talking a lot about wanting to, to put the first humans on Mars. And I said, how could you possibly be willing to gamble on that? It seems so unlikely.

And he said, well, when I first started, I knew it was extremely low probability. And so that wasn't the original mission for SpaceX. The mission was, I want to build a reusable rocket, and that's much more realistic. And I can get people on board with that. And I can get a government contract to do that. And I can get a government contract to do that. And I said, okay, quantify this for me. Like, what are the odds that you're going to make it to Mars in your lifetime? And he said, well, you know, a couple of years ago, I would have said, I don't know, seven, 8%. I'm like, and you're doing this despite that? And he said, well, no, no, the probability has gone way up since then. I'm like, okay, tell me more. And he said, I'd probably say 11% chance now. This is firing you up? He's like, come on, that's double digits. Like we're close to reality.

But I think that calculus of saying, I've got to know that this is unrealistic and I've got to have a side bet, which is something that can build me a viable company. And reusable rockets are what did it. That's what made SpaceX work. It's not the mission, the moonshot, or actually it's a Mars shot. That's not what ultimately allowed them to do what they do now. Is that in part on his behalf,

a bit of a framing thing to, as you said, get people on board? Because I think about Neuralink in the same way. When he first started talking about Neuralink, it was all about interfacing with AI. And the AI is coming and we need a way to be able to interface with it because it's going to be so much smarter than us that we basically need to become these cyborgs. And in more recent times, he's focused on the ability to give people who have lost access to their limbs the use of their limbs back. And I was thinking about the transition there he's done in messaging.

The latter, this idea of helping people who are disabled regain their ability, seems to be an idea that people will get on board with and will fund. The other idea of interfacing with AI and us becoming cyborgs doesn't appear to me like something people would get behind and fund. No, they either don't get it or they don't want it. Yeah, exactly. Not for me. Yeah, this is a common challenge for original thinkers, is sometimes their bold visions are just not palatable to other people. And there's a term that I love that Deborah Meyerson and Maureen Scully coined. They talk about being a tempered radical, which I think is a great phrase to say, take your big extreme idea and try to moderate it to make it a little bit more familiar and a little bit closer to what other people think is plausible and desirable. And then if you do that successfully, you can smuggle your vision

inside a Trojan horse. And that's all about bringing them with you. Interesting. Let's talk about people then. People in teams. One of my real obsessions is the topic of team culture. And it's something that you write about in part two of your book. Team culture.

What are we generally missing about what it takes to be and to build a great team? What are some of the sort of first myths that come to mind about the greatest teams that your work has debunked? Well, this is one of the big topics in my world of organizational psychology. And there are, I think, a bunch of findings that might surprise people. The first one is that we elevate the wrong people to leadership roles consistently. There's research on what's called the Babel effect, which is the idea that the more you talk in a meeting, the more likely you are to get selected as the leader of a team. So we reward people who dominate the conversation, even though they are not actually better at leadership. And often they're worse because they fail to include and learn from the voices around

them in the room. They're so obsessed with being the smartest person in the room that they fail to make the room smarter. And I think what happens there is that we're consistently mistaking their confidence for competence. So we need to change that. The people I want to elevate into leadership roles are basically people who bring generosity and humility to the table.

Generosity is about saying, I'm going to put my mission above my ego, and I'm going to try to make everybody in the room better. And I guess it's a form of servant leadership. And humility is about saying, it's my job to know what I don't know and try to learn from every single person I work with. And I think the idea of being a lifelong learner is something we throw around a lot, but we don't take seriously. I think part of being a lifelong learner is recognizing that every person you meet is a potential teacher. Every single collaborator of yours has lived experiences you haven't, has expertise that you don't. And if you fail to realize that, you are stunting your own progress. So I think we've got

to get humble givers into leadership roles because they're there to make the team successful. I've always had a suspicion that based on the size of the company and where it is in its life cycle, that a slightly different culture is required. And in your work, you talk about these commitment cultures. Now, a commitment culture, is that a cult? I hope not. The good ones aren't. Okay.

So you're anticipating the Barron and Hannon research on hundreds of startups for 15 years. And they compare cultural blueprints where some founders say, I'm going to build a star culture. I want to hire the biggest geniuses and the best talent. And that's what's going to make us great. And other founders say, no, I want to be about commitment. I'm going to focus first and foremost about do you fit the culture? Do you live our mission and breathe our values? And then you run the horse race and ask which approach is more successful from a culture perspective. And lo

and behold, the commitment cultures win. They are dramatically less likely to fail, significantly more likely to go public. And you think, we're good. We've hired people who are all in on our company. They made us a wildly successful startup. And then guess what? After these companies go public, they grow at slower rates. Why? There's a major risk that if you are hiring on culture fit, you are then saying, I'm only going to bring in people who are similar to each other. And you end up weeding out diversity of thought and background and promoting groupthink. Interesting. So, okay, you're all a little bit too close to the same painting. You're replicating what's already working for you and becoming more

and more homogeneous. And this is not to say the culture of fit is inherently bad. You do want people aligned on your three to five core values. And that's important. The mistake we make is when we look at fit, we think about, well, I want a bunch of people with the same personality traits. And I want a bunch of people who went to the same college or studied the same subject.

And then you end up with a really narrow band of expertise and that leads you to stagnate. How important do you think the culture you're in is on your own chance of success and performance? I often think this, I think we've been lucky, even as a podcast team, to be in a great culture. And I play out the scenario, if you took one of our team members and maybe move them to another culture, how much would that impact that team member's personal performance and chance of success? Oh, actually, Boris Groysberg studies this. He studies what happens when you're a star in one culture, and then you move to a new organization. So he studied this with Wall Street security analysts, so finance professionals. Turns out if you are a star performer at your current firm and you leave for a new firm, it takes you on average five years to recover your star performance unless you take your team with you. And then you maintain your star status from day one. What Boris argues is that we underestimate

the importance of the people we rely on to do our best work, and this is not unique at all to Wall Street. You can see it in research on cardiac surgeons, where it's pretty common for surgeons to operate at multiple hospitals. Well, it turns out that the more practice you have at hospital A, the lower your patient mortality rate is at hospital A. But then when you go over to

hospital B later that week, it's as if you haven't practiced at all because you're with a different team. They don't know your strengths and weaknesses. You haven't built effective routines together. You are much more interdependent than you realize, even if you think you're an individual expert. You can see it in sports too. It takes pro basketball teams three to four years on average, even if you've recruited a really talented team, to maximize their odds of winning a championship because they just haven't figured out how to be effective together. There was a NASA simulation years ago where you had to go through a flight simulator. And some crews were exhausted. They'd just come off of a multi-leg, multi-day, sleep-deprived journey.

And others were well-rested. And it turned out that the well-rested crews, who were strangers, actually made more potentially catastrophic errors than exhausted crews that had just flown together. And having a little bit of shared experience was enough to compensate for the lack of sleep. Now, I'm not suggesting that we should have pilots fly together and only sleep for, you know, two hours a night. But the idea that your history together was even more important than how alert you were is something that I think we ought to take really seriously. Gosh, it's like a double-edged sword though, because so your history together matters.

So you want to be with a familiar group of people. However, if you're too familiar with them, you're not going to come up with original ideas and be as creative and innovative as possible. So it's a balancing act between familiarity and novelty in the byway of introducing new members to the group that have new ideas as it relates to business. That's exactly right. And you actually see this in the sports data. After that, you know, three or four years of experience together,

the benefits of shared experience start to level off. And maybe the players get old. That's part of it. But their routines also become really predictable. Predictable to the opposition as well in the context of sports. Other coaches can go, they always do this. They always do it like this. This is how we'll defend against it. Same thing is true in business.

I think it's one of the reasons why so much innovation and disruption comes from the outside. Because inside an organization, people get so attached to the way we've always done it. They fall victim to what's called cognitive entrenchment, where they start to take for granted assumptions that need to be questioned. And you need to bring in outside talent, fresh perspectives, or rotate yourself, shift your country, shift your role, shift the group of people you're working with, go learn a new skill

set in order to get out of that entrenchment. When you think about and when you study companies and people that innovate, let's just focus specifically on the idea of teams that innovate. Let's just, I mean, bring it right back to the context of even, you know, this podcast. This podcast team is actually about 30, 32, 33 people now across the whole sort of business of the Diary of a CEO. It's going well. You know, we do well. It's better than well. Yeah, it's going well. It's like, you know, we've done a good job. I think that's fair to say. But there's a risk with that, which is when you've been right several times,

you can start to get a little bit creatively complacent. And also, I saw, I think it was Morgan Housel's book, Same As Ever, some research that shows when you are succeeding, when you're like number one at the thing you do, teams kind of switch off creatively and they go into a defense mode, which is, okay, this is how we've always done it. And it got us to here. So let's just keep doing it that way. But to self-disrupt almost doesn't make sense, you know? And so my question to you is from what you understand, what is the best way to keep a team like ours continually striving for the next thing, even when the outside world thinks you do a lot of things right? Best example I've ever seen was in a podcast episode I did at Pixar a few years ago. So let's go back to 2000. Pixar is at the top of its game. They've completely reinvented the way that animated movies are made. We used to think you had to draw them. Now they do them by computer. Toy Story is a huge hit. They've got monsters. They've got talking bugs. And, you know, they're riding as high as you can in the entertainment industry. And what most companies would do in that situation is they would rest on their laurels and keep making films the way they've done them.

Because, like you said, we should double down on our success. We know our core competencies. We're getting a ton of rewards for it. Well, Steve Jobs and Ed Catmull, who, you know, were running the show, were not content to rest on their laurels. And they knew that when you're succeeding, you actually have the most slack capacity to disrupt yourself, which is, of course, when most leaders are least likely to do it because they don't think they need to. And they said, we've got to shake things up. So they went and hired an unproven director named Brad Bird. He was coming

off a commercial flop. His previous film had been just a huge disappointment in terms of box office returns. And Brad came into Pixar and his charge was to change the way that they made animated films. Why? Because they wanted to keep getting better and they wanted to keep innovating. And Brad came in with a vision that he was told was crazy for a new animated film. He was told it was going to cost half a billion US dollars and take 10 years to make, which is just a non-starter if you're a film studio. And Brad got frustrated and he said, all right, you know what? Give me, he said, I want the pirates. I want the black sheep. I want people who are dissatisfied, disagreeable, and disgruntled.

And I'm going to build a band of misfits to try to prove that this movie can be made. And that group ends up finishing in a three-year period. So they shaved a year, at least, off the original expected time. They end up coming in under budget, becomes Pixar's most successful film ever, wins them some major awards. You might have seen it. It's called The Incredibles.

And what I think is incredible about that story is a couple of things. One, you know, just the will to break something that's not broken deliberately. I think that's huge. Number two, what Brad does is he discovers that there's a particular kind of disagreeableness that's really valuable. It's not just being cranky and ornery for the sake of it. It's not being a complainer. Brad says, I want people who are like racing cars stuck in a garage. Like they're just being stifled and, you know, Brad says, I want people who are like racing cars stuck in a garage.

Like they're, they're just being stifled and, you know, shot down and I'm going to open the garage and let them go. So in my giver taker framework, I would call those people disagreeable givers. They're gruff and tough on the surface, but they're doing it because they want to help and they have ideas to make things better. And they're, they're not content to just stick with the status quo. And there, there's a bunch of research to suggest that people who are highly disagreeable, if they're challenging people because they care, they actually end up driving more innovation. And so I've actually started advising leaders that most of us know the value of a support network and surrounding ourselves with mentors and colleagues who have our back. But what you actually need to get better is a challenge network, a group of thoughtful critics who you trust to hold up a mirror so you can see your own blind spots more clearly.

And Steve, this is not the norm when I work with leaders and founders. I think it's pretty common, actually. I don't want to name a specific example here, but I have interacted with a fair number of entrepreneurs and CEOs who have this vision of them coming into the office one morning and saying, good morning. And a bunch of people go, great point. It's a scary way to live. But you know this, as you gain status and power, it's harder to get people to tell you the truth. And that's why those disagreeable givers who are willing to challenge you are so valuable. How do you cultivate that?

What can you do to cultivate a circle of disagreeable givers? Or just people that are going to tell you the truth? Well, the first thing you do is you pay attention to who has actually been willing to push you. And you let them know that they play that role in your life. So I've actually done this in the past couple of years. I've had people who tore apart book drafts for me, people who told me I needed to go back to the drawing board on an early version of a TED Talk. And I've gone to them and I've said, hey, you may not know this, but I actually consider you

a founding member of my challenge network. First response, what the hell is a challenge network? Cause disagreeable people always talk like that. No, they don't. But, uh, I had to explain it. And I said, I know I haven't always taken your, you know, your challenge as well. Sometimes I've been defensive. Other times I've just been dismissive because I'm on a path and what you brought was diverting. And I regret that because I know I need you. You have to push me to think again and question the way I do things. So if I ever, you know, if you ever hesitate because you're afraid of hurting my feelings or damaging our relationship, don't. The only way you can hurt me is by not telling me the truth. And the particular conversation I found really powerful there is to let people know that they often feel a tension between honesty and loyalty.

I don't see a trade-off there. For me, honesty is the highest expression of loyalty. The more candid and direct you are with me, the more I will value your input. And sometimes that's enough. In other cases, I have to go a step further, which is something that I explored in some research. Turns out that sometimes asking people for input doesn't get them over the hurdle. They're still afraid or they think it's just an exercise in futility. So what you have to do is criticize yourself out loud

and say, here are the things I think I'm bad at. Here are the current shortcomings I see in my work. And what you're doing then is you're not just claiming you're open to feedback, you are proving you can take it. So in that instance, where you criticize yourself out loud, and you say, God, I'm so bad at this or that, is in part why you're doing that to make it a safe space for them to then build on what you've just said? Yeah, you're trying to create psychological safety as Amy Edmondson describes it.

And in some research that I did with Konstantinos Koutifaris, we found that when leaders sat down and didn't just say, I wanna know what I can do better at, but said, here are the things that I think I need to work on. A year later, when they were randomly assigned to do that, their teams actually were more willing to speak up and challenge them and give them constructive criticism. And I think part of what happens when you do that, and I actually do this in my own classroom. I read students some of the toughest feedback I've gotten in my career.

One said that I reminded them of a Muppet. Never told me which Muppet. Thanks for that. There was another where a military leader had written, I gained nothing from this session, but I trust the instructor got useful insight. Not fun at the time. But what I find is when I read those comments out loud afterward, I hear much more honest input from my students. They tell me things that they think are not going well in my class. They give me new ideas for improvement. And I think what I've done there

is I'm showing that I take my work really seriously. I don't take myself that seriously. And, you know, I'm sort of unoffendable is the goal. And sometimes they build, like they'll, you know, they'll, they'll say, yeah, we see that weakness and you still need to work on it. And other times they say, well, maybe you have a blind spot. You didn't tell us about this area where you're struggling, but we see this here. Steve, I have to say a lot of people get the concept

but are afraid to do it because they don't want to admit what they're bad at to the people who work with them. Well, guess what? The people you work with every day, they already know what they're bad at to the people who work with them. Well, guess what? The people you work with every day, they already know what you're bad at. You can't hide it from them, right? So you might as well get credit for having the self-awareness to see it and the humility and integrity to admit it out loud.

On this point of teams as well and groups of people, the other thing that was quite challenging that I loved that you discuss is this idea that brainstorming doesn't really work well. And to maximize collective intelligence, we get more and better ideas when we work alone. And again, it kind of, there's a through line here with what we said at the start about procrastination and the use of boredom. One thing that's really helped me recently that I wanted to share and see if there's any resonance with you is when I have ideas, usually when I'm alone, to be fair, or when I'm reading or when I'm thinking or writing about something, I then write them out into memos now, which is just like a couple of pages for me to understand them. And then I share them with people. Before, I didn't do that. Before

I was a bit more of a pepperer. I take something I was thinking about and just pepper it into like a group chat. Whereas now having time and space to write about it seems to be helping me to refine the ideas better, but just helps me to come up with better ideas. My question here is about how groups of people form their best ideas and what you would suggest based on the research. Well, you're living the evidence. So let's, yeah, let's unpack this a little bit. I think decades of research on brainstorming have shown that if you get a group of people together to generate ideas, if instead you would put them in separate rooms and let them work alone, you would have gotten more ideas and also better ideas. A lot of people are surprised by this, and there are a few reasons behind it that have good support.

One is called production blocking. We can't all talk at once. Some ideas get lost. Two is ego threat. I don't want to look like an idiot. So I bite my tongue on my most unconventional ideas. And then three is conformity pressure, which is sometimes called the HIPPO effect. My favorite acronym, HIPPO stands for the highest paid person's opinion.

Interesting. As soon as that's known, people jump on the bandwagon and you get too much convergent thinking, not enough divergent thinking. How do we get past that in organizations? Is it about anonymity with ideas? It can be. If you're in a low psychological safety environment

where people are worried about their reputations, then yes, anonymous ideas help. But I want to get to a point where people are willing to put their names on their ideas. So I want to go in the direction that you've gone personally, which is psychologists recommend brain writing as an alternative to brainstorming. What you do is you recognize that writing is not just a tool for communicating, it's a tool for thinking. When you write out your thoughts, you can't get away with a half-baked idea that kind of is sold by your charisma. You actually get tested on your logic.

And what you do is recognize that individuals are more creative than groups. They have more brilliant ideas. They have more variety than groups do. But they also have more terrible ideas than groups. And so we need a process to generate variety and then filter toward quality. And what brain writing does is you have everybody write down their own separate ideas. Then you collect them and you have everyone do independent ratings.

So you get their judgment preserved before they're biased by what their peers think. Then once you have all the ratings, you take the most promising ideas and you begin developing and refining those. And what you have all the ratings, you take the most promising ideas and you begin developing and refining those. And what you're trying to do then is to take the wisdom of crowds to make the ideas with high potential succeed. And I think for me, brainwriting is one of the best ways to unlock the hidden potential in the group because it is not the

loudest talker. It's not the most enthusiastic speaker who necessarily has the most compelling ideas. I was thinking as you're talking about how I might implement that into some of my teams, and I was thinking about, so how would you create anonymity of the submission of the idea without people having some idea based on the way the person's writing who it is? You know what I mean? Because there's some people in art, I think, in teams, that you'd be able to just know from how they wrote something who it was. Here's an idea. Thinking out loud. One thing I've tried from time to time

is I've paired people up to then write down and pitch each other's ideas. Oh, okay. So you're separating the person who had the thought from the way it's being communicated. And I wonder if rotating a little bit that way could help. Oh, interesting. Okay. So you could have one person read out all the ideas basically to a full group and then having them write independently or yeah. Interesting. Potential. Why did you, why did you write this book Hidden Potential?

I wrote it, I wrote it really for two reasons. One is that I saw in the evidence that we underestimate potential in ourselves and others consistently. We think you can judge where people will land from where they start. But as we talked about with prodigies earlier, you can't always do that. And I'd read some classic research on world-class musicians, artists, athletes, and scientists showing that they rarely stood out as better than their peers early on. Their early teachers, their coaches, even their own parents didn't know how much potential they had. And when they did stand out, it was not for unusual ability. It was for unusual motivation. They were driven. They were passionate. And I wanted to dispel the myth that if you're not instantly good at something,

you should walk away from it and only play to your strengths. And I wanted to do that in part because it wasn't just the evidence that spoke to me. I lived this. I was a terrible springboard diver when I started. I never would have imagined that I was going to be a junior Olympic national qualifier. As we talked about, I really struggled with public speaking. I didn't expect to go there. And I also, I failed the writing test when I arrived at university and was assigned to remedial writing. And here I am an author. And so I've lived hidden potential along with studying it.

And I felt like it was time to put those ideas out into the world. Do you really, do you believe that your potential exists somewhere? Or do you think it's something that you create every time you push yourself? Can I say both? Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I've always wondered this. I've always wondered if my life is the pursuit of my potential or if my life is the creation of my potential.

That is a brilliant question. I love the way you frame that. I think it's always a little bit of both because we all have different, you know, skills and strengths that come naturally to us and different challenges, uh, that, that are hardwired. And so you could say like, I had a ceiling on my athletic ability, right? Like I, there are just, there are certain things I'm never going to be able to do, uh, as, as badly as I wanted to become a professional athlete. Uh, but a big part of me learning how to become a decent diver

was trying to raise that ceiling. And after I retired, Eric, my coach, said to me that I got farther with less talent than any diver he'd coached. I wasn't sure if that was a compliment, but it actually is a huge compliment because he felt like I'd stretched my capabilities. And I think for me, hidden potential is about realizing that we all have capacities for growth

that are invisible to us and sometimes to the people around us. As it relates to unlocking that growth and being that overachiever that you were as it relates to diving, is there anything we haven't discussed that is critical to unlocking that potential? I think so. I think- throw some of those things at me yeah so one of my favorites so can i tell you a little story please one of my other challenges as a diver was uh i was afraid

of heights and i also was afraid of extreme pain there's nothing there's there's nothing fun about you know doing a belly flop uh when flop when you're up on a three meter springboard, nevermind a 10 meter platform, which I avoided like the plague. And I was especially afraid when it was time to try a new dive because I was going to hurl myself into midair, spin and twist, get lost. And there's a high probability that you're going to smack. So I would stand there at the end of the board shaking. I would waste a lot of time in practice. Sometimes it would be five minutes, 10 minutes. One practice, I stood on the board for 45 minutes and I wouldn't go. I was wasting my time. I was wasting my teammates' time. I was wasting my coach's time. And Eric finally said to me, he said,

Adam, are you going to do this dive? And I'm like, ever? Like, yes, of course. One day I will do this dive. And he said, great. Then what are you waiting for? And I've heard that voice in my head every time I've been afraid to take a risk. And I've been hesitating to go outside my comfort zone. I heard it when I was afraid to write my first book,

and I didn't think I was ready. I heard it when I was considering giving a TED Talk, and I didn't feel capable of doing a good job at it. I think the lesson I took from that was, I thought that I had to build my confidence in order to take the leap. And that was completely backward. You build your confidence by taking the leap. And so I was kind of waiting for the magic day when I felt ready. And the reality is you become ready by putting yourself in situations that you don't think you can excel at yet. Do you think that's enough to push people off the board? As a sort of an analogy for life generally, because there'll be so many people that have just heard that.

And just hearing that will enable some of them to take the leap. And then there's this other stubborn crowd that will hear that, that will understand it, that will believe it's true. And they still won't take the leap. They still will stay in that job.

They still won't push themselves beyond their zone of comfort. Is there anything else that's required to get those people over the edge? Or is it too individualistic to know? Well, I think one thing that group of people might have in common is a pervasive imposter syndrome, right? The sense that, well, first of all, when people talk about imposter syndrome, sometimes they say, okay, like I'm a fraud

and it's only a matter of minutes until everybody finds out. And that feeling is actually pretty rare. What's much more common if you look at the research of Basima Tufek is imposter thoughts, everyday doubts about, am I as good as other people think I am? Am I ready for this role that other people are encouraging me to take on? Can I afford to, you know, to quit my job and try becoming an entrepreneur? And what the research suggests is that there are actually some surprising benefits of having those imposter thoughts.

Basima finds, she studies medical professionals, investment professionals, military cadets, students, that when you have more frequent imposter thoughts, they actually can become fuel to motivate you to persist toward your goals. And the reason that happens is there's a gap between what other people think you're capable of and what you feel prepared for. And you realize, okay, I've got to put in extra effort and I've got to be better at listening to other people and learning from them in order to close the gap. So Basima's advice is when you feel like an imposter, you should recognize that other people think you're pretty amazing. And now, all right, let's live up to those expectations.

And I would go even further. I would say it's really tempting to trust your own judgment of your abilities above other people, because you know more about yourself than any other human can possibly know about you. But here's the problem. You know too much about yourself to compare yourself accurately to others. And you're also not neutral, right? You can't be objective and independent and unbiased.

So I think what you want to do is you want to see yourself through the eyes of people who know you well. And if multiple people believe in you, it's probably time to believe them. Give me one more. Let's make this the closing one. As it relates to realizing our potential and unlocking our hidden potential, which is, you know, if I was able to achieve anything with this podcast over the time that we ran it, allowing people to realize and pursue their potential, I think would be one of the greatest achievements that we as a team could have achieved by doing this podcast it's something

that i just think i think people's much of their happiness much of their fulfillment um much of their health probably lies in the pursuit of their potential whatever that means and all of the opposite stuff much of their dissatisfaction their unhappiness probably lies in their um their regret and their understanding that they can and could have probably lies in their um their regret and their understanding that they can and could have done more in their lives i mean you think about brony where all the time that study she did on those palliative patients where so many of them wish they'd lived the life true to themselves so many of them wish that they'd taken that jump and pursued that thing that was maybe a little bit more risky so what is the closing argument here for those people that are trying to unlock their hidden

potential well i think if if you look at regret psychologists find that our biggest regrets in the long run are not our failures there are failures to try and it's the actions not taken that we wish we could redo the most. I think finding the motivation and the courage to take those risks is not always easy for people. And I think one thing that I've found helpful over time that has some good evidence behind it is a lot of us know we need other people's input in order to get better.

So what we do is we ask for feedback. And the problem with asking for feedback is you end up with a bunch of cheerleaders and critics. The cheerleaders you don't fully trust because they see you through rose-colored glasses and they just applaud your best self. The critics are devastating. They attack your worst self.

We want our coaches, people who see your hidden potential and help you become a better version of yourself. And see, I mean, Steve, you've seen this forever. World-class athletes and musicians and actors have coaches. We all need coaches in our lives and they don't have to be somebody we hire. You don't have to have a budget. There are people that you rely on who are part of that challenge network who enable you to keep growing. So how do you get your cheerleaders and critics to be better coaches? What you do is instead of asking them for feedback, you to keep growing. So how do you get your cheerleaders and critics to be better coaches? What you do is instead of asking them for feedback, you seek their advice. When you ask for feedback, people look at the past. If you ask for advice, they turn to the future

and they become more specific and more actionable in giving you tips and suggestions. So if you go back, I'll give you the personal example on this one. Go back to the military leaders that I taught who told me that they gained nothing from my session, but they hope I learned something. I've got a bunch of critics in that situation and they're demoralizing me. I want to give up. I'm like, I wonder if I could actually build the ability to hibernate. And then in a few months, I'll feel better. But I had committed to teach a second session for these military leaders. And it was about a week later.

I didn't have time to reboot all my content. And so I went to my critics and tried to turn them into coaches. And I asked them for advice on what to do differently in the next session. And one of them said, a big mistake I made was I led with my credentials and I tried to convince them that I was an expert. Well, I was 25 years old. These are seasoned military leaders. They've got multi-billion pound budgets. They've got thousands of flying hours under their belts. They've got Top Gun style nicknames. I'm not going to convince them that I am more experienced than they are. And this one person said, you know, you should try calling out the elephant in the room.

Be a little more vulnerable. So I walk in the next week, I look out at the room and I say, all right, I know what you're all thinking right now. What could I possibly learn from a professor who's 12 years old? Silence. And then one guy calls science sand dune, jumps in, and he says, that's ridiculous. You got to be at least 13. They all burst out laughing. It broke the ice. I more or less taught the same material,

but the feedback was much more positive afterward. They told me that although I was junior in experience, I dealt with the evidence in an interesting way. And they liked learning from somebody who was almost as young as the millennials they were trying to lead. And I learned from that experience that the very people who were, it felt like they were trying to take me down. If I asked for their advice instead of their feedback, they actually gave me a tip that built me up. It made me think about something that I learned from reading your work, which is this difference between self-promotion and idea promotion as well. I actually sent it to a friend earlier on. My friend runs a personal branding company. It's called Ashley. The company's called Great Influence. And he spends his time basically helping leaders build their personal brand. And he'll often send

me things that he's seen online. And when I read about your concept of self-promotion versus idea promotion, I realized that all the things he sends me that are bad are self-promotion and all the things that he sends me are good, are fundamentally idea promotion. What is the distinction, just so we're clear? I think the distinction for me is that self-promotion is about saying, look at me. Let me tell you about all my accomplishments and awards. I'm going to show off my trophies and I'm trying to impress you and make you think that I'm great. Idea promotion is saying, I have something worth sharing and I want to elevate a product, a service, an insight. And people have dramatically different reactions to the two,

right? The first comes across as narcissistic and bragging and self-centered. The second is actually seen as an act of generosity. You're taking your knowledge and your skills and you're trying to create a gift for other people and hoping that they receive it. And I think this is so important because a lot of people don't share their ideas. They don't put their work out there because they're afraid of looking like they're self-promoting and they are doing such a disservice to the world by not releasing their creativity. So many people have a problem with that. So many people have a problem, especially when they're making a transition from being someone who was quiet or silent to that first post that first

book that first um and part of that is because of the impact it has on the people that know you so for me for example the first time i wrote like a quote or an idea online i felt that anxiety of oh my god my friends from school are going to think i think i'm like mahatma gandhi or like nelson mandela or something because i'm sharing my ideas and that anxiety of, oh my God, my friends from school are going to think I think I'm like Mahatma Gandhi or like Nelson Mandela or something because I'm sharing my ideas. And the sheer fact that I'm sharing my ideas means that I think I've got good ideas and I think I'm smart. And so the best thing to do is just not to share the ideas so that my friends don't judge me for whatever reason I managed to persist. And I shared an idea. And I actually, in the early stages of sharing my ideas

on the internet, I got some feedback from my friend Jamie that told me one of our mutual friends was like criticizing me. He was saying like, who the fuck does he think he is? This was like nine years ago, maybe. Who the fuck does he think he is? He thinks he's da-da-da-da, etc. That was difficult, persisted, and I'm so glad I did because it changed my life. And I think there's so many people that are in that exact moment where they've got ideas, they've got skills that they could share. It would transform their lives and add value to the lives of other people, but they're stuck because, yeah, they're scared of it feeling like self-promotion. I believe everyone has ideas worth sharing and that we have a responsibility to not deprive the people around us from learning. And I think the

great thing about the democratization of knowledge is that anybody can access anybody else's ideas. And so I think there's an opportunity for all of us to put our thoughts out there. This might be an unpopular opinion, but I don't think the framing as personal branding is helpful because it centers stages self-promotion. I don't want to have a brand. When people tell me I said something on brand, I feel like I've been typecast or I'm losing my authenticity. What I want is I want to have a reputation. I don't want to be a shiny product that's packaged with a bunch of slogans. I want to be somebody who's known for a set of values. And one of those values is original thinking and rethinking. And that means I should

even disagree with my own ideas. If I don't contradict myself, I am failing to learn. Gosh, I remember after Give and Take came out, I got branded as the nice guy is finished first guy for the givers over takers message. And I was so annoyed by that, first of all, because a lot of givers aren't nice. Helping other people is different from being polite to them. And the disagreeable givers were a case in point of that. And eventually I was like, maybe my next book needs to be called Take and Take

and write about why selfish assholes succeed just because I'm so committed to evolving what I think. And I don't think you do that if you're trying to maintain a personal brand that's consistent in representing a certain slogan. I think you do that if you're trying to live a set of values. Amen. It really has made me rethink,

rethink not just the term personal branding but really the purpose of the true purpose of idea promotion is the pursuit of truth right and knowledge and um in the process of that you obviously gain a ton yourself but we talked about earlier i think they often call it the freiman technique where by writing and sharing you're actually learning more than anyone else i think it was james clear said, the person that learns most in any classroom is, in fact, the teacher. But the importance of being okay with being inconsistent, being continually wrong, your old work contradicting your new work, is very important but not easy to do

because of the cognitive dissonance that admitting you're wrong creates. This is a central question of Think Again. And I'm so struck. I originally learned this framework from Phil Tetlock and then I started studying it. I'm so struck by how many people spend too many of their waking hours thinking like preachers, prosecutors, and politicians.

So when you go into preacher mode, you're proselytizing your own ideas. In prosecutor mode, you're attacking somebody else's ideas. And in politician mode, you don't even bother to listen to people unless they already agree with your ideas. And I always like to ask, I find that most people have a dominant style that gets them in trouble. So mine is prosecutor mode. If I think you're wrong, like it is my professional and moral responsibility to correct you, which never goes well. And I've even been called a logic bully, which my wife had to explain to me was not a compliment.

I think I'm a logic bully. Are you? I think so sometimes. Fellow prosecutor. It's my, it's maybe this is an excuse. So maybe I'm bullshitting myself here. But when I hear an idea, I think part of my pursuit of learning is by challenging it. And that's not always a good thing,

especially when it's your girlfriend and she's just trying to tell you something and you're like,. It's like, you don't need to interact with people like that all the time. I make this mistake all the time. And I, you know, Alison calls me out regularly. She's like, you actually do not need to argue with an idea to understand it. And you don't have to pressure test

every single, you know, point that's made. Sometimes you can listen and learn from other people as opposed to duking it out to try to figure out who's right. And I think it's such an important note because in prosecutor mode, you've already concluded that other people are wrong and you're right. So you lose the ability to open your mind. And the same thing happens if you're preaching or politicking. You know, you're basically drinking your own Kool-Aid or listening only to your own tribe and trapping yourself in an echo chamber.

And so I got really curious about how do we get out of those modes? What's an alternative? And my favorite alternative is to think more like a scientist. When I say think like a scientist, I do not mean that you need to buy a microscope or, you know, a telescope. I mean that you don't let your ideas become your identity. That you recognize every opinion you hold, it's just a hypothesis. You can test it. Every decision you make, just an experiment. It might succeed, it might fail. And when you do that, it turns out when people can be taught to think more like scientists, when you teach people to see their opinions as hypotheses, their decisions as experiments, lo and behold, they make better choices. They achieve more success because they become more flexible. They change their minds

faster. They're quicker to recognize that they're wrong. And that means they're quicker to get it right. But if Jack had loads of ideas and every single time any idea came out of his mouth, even if it was a good morning, and we all went, Jack, you're so right. It's hard to see how Jack's self-esteem or his ego doesn't take a boost there and him become more committed to being right in the future. Because then imagine if we did that for one year as an experiment, then suddenly we turn around one day and go, Jack, what are you talking about? That is wrong. You can imagine his his ego you know swelling and going what so i guess what i'm trying to say is how difficult it is for us to disassociate our self-worth with being right yes yeah i've a colleague once told me that the worst problem he sees in humanity is the addiction to being right.

Yeah. And I think it's much more important to focus on getting it right than being right. And one of the ways you do that is you do not let your beliefs become part of your self-concept. So people are like, wait, what are you basically? Who are you if you're not what you think? You are what you value. What's the difference between values and beliefs? Beliefs are what you think is true.

Values are what you think is important. And I think this is such a critical distinction because when you start to base your identity, your sense of self and your ego and your self-esteem and self-worth on what you think is true, then admitting you were wrong is a major threat. Whereas when you start to see yourself as someone who values curiosity or is a lifelong learner, now changing your mind is a moment of

growth. So a simple example, before evidence-based medicine, there were a lot of people who called themselves doctors to be like, oh, you're feeling anxious? Let's give you a frontal lobotomy. You think that's an effective way to treat anxiety. That's a belief of yours, right? If that becomes part of your identity, if you see yourself as a professional lobotomist, you are never going to believe the evidence that this is harmful. If you see yourself instead as somebody who helps treat anxiety and that's your value, the moment you read the careful evidence saying this is not working and it's also really dangerous is the moment you change your mind.

And so I think what this means fundamentally is you have a set of principles that you stay true to, but you're very flexible when it comes to your practices and policies. I'm going to do my very, very best. Try it at your own risk. Yeah, I'm going to try it. Adam, thank you. Thank you for all the work you do because you've forced me to challenge myself over and over again in all the books you've written. But central to all the books you've written is the idea of challenging oneself, which I think is one of the most important messages which is just this continual pursuit of truth knowledge and um questioning the status quo and then questioning that and i think that that process of sort of iterative experimentation that humility that um ability to maintain the student mindset throughout your career is the path to success in both your

professional pursuits but also your personal ones one of the things that's really helped me in my relationships is this idea of remaining humble to new information and facts you embody that as a human being but you embody it in all of your work and your work is original and that's why it's so challenging something i aspire to in the work that I make is to go to those extra lengths to create wonderfully original work. I sometimes sit on this show and I will recommend someone to go and buy one of the author's books. But in this case, I can't because I think people need to buy them all. They all offer something so challenging in a very important way. The Hidden Potential is the newest book, right? That's the brand new, that came out in October last year, didn't it? But they're all essential books for different

chapters and different perspectives and different phases of life. So I'd recommend everybody go buy all three of the books that I have in front of me here, which is the originals Think Again and Hidden Potential. Get them as a nice little package deal on Amazon because they are really important books to push your thinking forward. And that's exactly what you've done for me as an entrepreneur. You've pushed my thinking forward. So a huge thank you from myself, but also for the millions of people that have benefited from your work. Thank you. That's incredibly generous of you. And it means a lot to me considering the source, because you are an original. And one of the things I love about Diary of the CEO is you

are constantly challenging people to rethink their ideas and to try new things and unlock their hidden potential. So you're doing what I study on this show. And I think it's amazing. And not anyone can make Malcolm Gladwell cry. I've known him for over a decade. I've never seen him break down into tears before or since. So well done there. Before we wrap, I have a couple

questions for you. I snuck a couple in as we were going, but there are a couple of things I was curious about in your game. I thought, why do I feel nervous? You should. I'm turning the tables here. You should feel nervous. Isn't this cool? Every single conversation I have here on the Diary of a CEO, at the very end of it, you'll know, I asked the guest to leave a question in the Diary of a CEO. And what we've done is we've turned every single question written in the Diary of a CEO into these conversation cards that you can play at home. So you've got every guest we've ever had, their question, and on the back of it, if you scan that QR code, you get to watch the person who answered that question. We're finally revealing all of the questions and the people

that answered the question. The brand new version two updated conversation cards are out right now at theconversationcards.com. Quick one. If you guys have heard me speak on this podcast before about company culture and the secret to building a world-class company, you know that everything starts with people, which brings me to our sponsor on this podcast, which I'm very excited to announce today, which is LinkedIn Jobs.

The entrepreneurs and business owners that listen to this podcast, you'll probably want to hear this one. So stay tuned for a second. Whenever I'm looking to hire, my first port of call is LinkedIn Jobs. Throughout all of my companies, this is our go-to method of hiring. And let me tell you why. Firstly, it's super easy. It takes about five minutes to create a free job post on LinkedIn. And secondly, you can add a hiring frame to your profile picture, allowing

others to know that you're hiring. And lastly, you can set up screening questions, which is LinkedIn's way of helping you to find the best possible candidate that matches your needs. And today I'm giving the Diver SEO community a free LinkedIn job post. Head to linkedin.com slash D-O-A-C now and let me know how you get on. And terms and conditions apply. That's a free job post. So go get it now. First question is, where do you think your hidden potential lies? I think my hidden potential relies in what you would typically think of more creative mediums, like music and theater and things like that. I think that's where my hidden potential lies.

And I think much of the reason I haven't ever pursued it or unlocked it is because I've lived under this limiting belief that I don't have the right to because my identity says entrepreneur. Time to expand your identity. Yes. And also because I'm just not good at it. I'm not as good at it as people that I think of as musical or, you know, it's only in recent years.

You're not good enough yet. Exactly. Okay, so you're not Beyonce today? Yeah, but I can be Beyonce. But if I committed more time to it and I could get over the initial hurdle of the delta between me and Beyonce, maybe I'd pursue it and maybe I'd become it. But I think that's where my hidden potential lies is in the creative things. And I think it's in part because I have, when you've succeeded succeeded at something it reinforces your identity as that thing and that can trap you in a box it can uh what's something i can do better as a podcast guest

oh gosh um conversational question or writer or thinker or you know anything when i think about great podcast guests on this show what they do well is they start with stories, and then they hit us with some kind of stat factor study to reinforce that. And then they kind of follow with a conclusion. And I can tell in the preamble whether the podcast is going to do well, basically based on that, the way that they deliver their information. I'll say sometimes I fail on that. I think there are a couple moments where I started with the data because that's where my energy begins where I could have led with story I think that would maybe be it I learned from one of our speakers that the more obscure and surprising the start of their response

obviously the more the viewer leans in so if I said for example if you ask me a question and then I responded with if i look into your left eye i can make you fall in love with me because it's immediate logic bully i don't believe that for a second i want to hear more exactly and it's the lean in and so i was thinking of dr tyra swart for example when she came on

she she would often start her her with a really obscure, provocative open, and it would make you lean in. Before we started the podcast, I was like, she is going to bang as a podcast. Did the podcast, put it out there, 9 million views on YouTube. She's a smash hit. And then she went on to other people's podcasts, smash it, smash it, smash it, smash it, smash it. And what I identified in the preamble was the way she told stories you do that well if there was an opportunity to close the gap from the nine out of ten you are to the ten of excellence if that exists it would be just to do that more frequently something i'm trying to do so thank you that's enormously helpful and also overly kind i uh i think part of what you're talking about is what the Heath brothers have called a curiosity gap, uh, where you put out a puzzle and then it becomes social sciences actually talk

about it as an itch that you have to scratch. You're like, I gotta know more about that. And that that's what leads you to, to kind of, um, lean in on that. I think that's a great note. And that's definitely something I need to work on. I'm always worried when I go on a podcast that the story is too long and I want to have a conversation as opposed to just an interview. And if I were, you know, if I were writing it in a book

or if I were giving a talk on stage, I would, you know, I would of course tell the story, but does the story interfere with the dialogue? And I think I need to let go of that because first of all, there's no reason why you can't tell a short story. And second of all,

some of the best stories take a couple minutes to unfold. Oh, 100%. I think all the best things are stories. I think it's the way that the brain finds it most compelling to learn. I'm going to have the last question because it's a tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're leaving it for. So the question that's been left for you,

they didn't sign it that's unusual what is your first historical rather than personal memory i.e the first time you realized there is a big world out there unrelated to you and your friends and family wow what an interesting question. You know, I don't know if this was the first. It's the most vivid. It was 1989. I was eight. And I heard Billy Joel's song, We Didn't Start the Fire. And I had never heard of most of the references in that song. I was like, what's Studebaker? I knew what television was. What happened in North Korea and South Korea? And I ended up doing a project, just a personal project to get the backstory of every reference in that song. And I didn't know it, but that was the first research project I ever did. And I guess

it was foreshadowing. Wow. That is an obscure answer that I wasn't expecting. I was expecting some kind of like world tragedy or something. That's so interesting. That's the one I remember. Adam, thank you. Thank you. This has been a joy and an honor. Appreciate you so much. Thank you.

Right back at you. Quick one from one of our sponsors. A lot of you have asked me the question about Huel over the years about where Huel fits into your life. Is it the most healthy choice one can make when they're thinking about their nutrition? And here's what I would say to all of those people. I think in an ideal world, I would be able to sit down and cook and prepare all of my meals. I think that would be my ideal option. But because of the nature of my life, because I'm moving

around often, what used to happen before Huel was I'd end up making bad choices I'd end up snacking I'd have junk food options on the go because I was busy and my nutrition would come second to whatever my professional priority was what Huel allows you to do is to have a healthier option on the go that is convenient that contains a lot of the nutrients that you need to have a complete diet and that's exactly where it fits in my life they've now expanded the range if you haven't yet checked out the Huel RTD I highly recommend you do go to your local Tesco Boots or Sainsbury's or online and you can grab and try one there you need a podcast to listen to next we've discovered that people who liked this episode

also tend to absolutely love another recent episode we've done so I've linked that episode in the description below. I know you'll enjoy it.