The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos - Unlock Your Hidden Potential with Adam Grant and Maya Shankar

Episode Date: May 13, 2024

A chance to hear a recent episode of A Slight Change of Plans in which Maya Shankar asks psychologist Adam Grant about his new book "Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things". They talk about how to filter out unhelpful feedback, the benefits of imperfectionism, and why we need to give soft skills more respect.  Listen to more episodes of A Slight Change of Plans  wherever you get your podcasts. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin. The Happiness Lab is taking a very short break while we put the finishing touches on a new season of shows devoted to topics that are dear to my heart and involve some of the people dear to my heart. People like my mom. So this is for a whole podcast season that we're doing on stuff that I'm bad at. OK. This is a whole episode about boredom because I feel like I'm pretty bad at boredom. You are. But I feel like I'm bad at boredom because you're bad at boredom.

Yeah. No, I didn't do well with doing nothing. You'll be able to hear the new season in a few weeks. But today I wanted to share an episode of a podcast that I think you'll love. It's called A Slight Change of Plans, hosted by my friend and former student, Maya Shunker. In this episode, Maya talks to psychologist Adam Grant about his new book, Hidden Potential, The Science of Achieving Greater Things. Adam discusses a whole bunch of interesting ideas to help you perform better, from filtering out unhelpful feedback to embracing imperfectionism. I hope you'll enjoy this episode, and be sure to check out more editions of A Slight Change of Plans. So much of learning requires us to put ourselves in uncomfortable situations,

because that's where the challenge lies. But the fear of embarrassment holds us back. And so we end up making these tiny little adjustments instead of big leaps. Author and podcaster Adam Grant is back on a slight change of plans. And he's got a new book full of ideas for how we can unlock our hidden potential. One of his tips is to think differently about how we learn from others. A lot of people think being a sponge is about just absorbing as much information as you can. Seek infinite amounts of feedback. Engage all of your critics. Not so much. Not all critics are thinking critically. And I think a huge part of being an effective sponge is being proactive, not just about what you take in, but also what you expel out. On today's episode, how to unlock your hidden potential. I'm Maya Shunker, and this is A Slight Change of Plans,

a show about who we are and who we become in the face of a big change. Adam is an organizational psychologist and a professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. He's also the author of a bunch of bestsellers and a repeat visitor to the TED stage. I'm pretty sure after one more TED Talk, he can turn in his punch card for a free sandwich. Adam's new book is called Hidden Potential, The Science of Achieving Greater Things. And as you'll hear, this is one of my favorite topics to discuss and spar with him about. I started our conversation by asking Adam why he's so interested in the topic of hidden potential. I think there's so many reasons to be interested

in it. I mean, how many times have you met somebody who didn't live up to the potential you saw in them because they didn't see it in themselves or because they weren't lucky enough to have a coach or a mentor or a teacher or a parent who saw it in them? And I think the fundamental mistake we make, and we make this mistake when we're judging other people and when we're evaluating ourselves, is that we assess potential by where we start. And if something's easy for us, if we have a natural talent for it, then we assume there's a very high ceiling on our potential. And if we struggle early, or if we fail, we think this is not for me. And what we overlook is that growth is not determined

by where you start. It's about the distance you can travel. But we can't see that distance yet. We don't have a crystal ball to look into the future. And so we end up missing out on a great deal of possibility that I think goes unrecognized. Yeah. And one thing I loved reading about in your book is you say the things that you're most proud of aren't the domains where you've gotten to the highest heights. It's actually where you started off at the lowest point, but made a ton of progress along the way. So can you share a little bit more about that? I really loved sports growing up. And after failing to make the middle school basketball team and the high school soccer team, I turned my attention to springboard diving, which I had sort of caught the bug for late as a teenager. And it was abundantly clear that I did

not have the physical talent to be a great diver. My teammates called me Frankenstein because I didn't bend my knees when I walked, which is ironic because in order to touch my toes, I had to bend my knees. I wasn't flexible. I didn't have the grace or explosive power. And I was also afraid of heights. So not exactly set up for success. And I had an extraordinary coach, Eric Best, who said on day one of practice, I will never cut anyone who wants to be here. And if you focus your energy on this, I believe you can be a state finalist by the time you're a senior in high school. coaching, I made the state finals as a junior in high school. And I got nowhere near the Olympics, let's be clear. I could not have qualified for Olympic trials if my life depended on it. But I got a lot better than I ever expected. I ended up qualifying for the junior Olympic nationals twice, and I made the All-American list and ended up getting recruited to dive in college.

And it was such a pivotal experience for me to realize just because I start with a lack of talent doesn't mean I can't overcome many of the obstacles on my path. Yeah. Yeah. I resonate with your story. I truly think there's nothing that I enjoy more in life than witnessing progress. Well, maybe a really good Indian meal cooked by my mother, but second to that, cooked by my mother. But second to that, I love witnessing progress. And so I think my version of Adam as the diver is I began learning Mandarin about six years ago or so because my husband's Chinese and none of his relatives speak English. And so I thought, oh, this would be a really nice way to connect with his family and, you know, try to show them that I, you know, really love Jimmy and I really, you know, want to fit into the family. And talk about a low starting point, Adam. I took the cake there. I promise. But the joy of improving at a language that I found so challenging

has been intoxicating, like truly. So I remember there was this one day where I got into a Lyft and it was clear that driver was a little bit uneasy because he didn't speak English. And then I looked at his phone and I saw Chinese characters and I was like, this is my moment. And so I built up all this courage and I spoke to him in broken Mandarin and he understood what I was saying. And after I got out of that Lyft, I called Jimmy and I was squealing. It was literally like the best day of my year. And so, yeah, and that starting point again was so low. But when you witness the potential that you had in a space where you really underestimated yourself, it's just so satisfying.

That's amazing. I had no idea that you learned Mandarin. Where have you been hiding this secret? Well, learning. I-N-G. It is a works in progress. Well, learning, I-N-G. It is a works in progress. So this is what's really interesting, because this, I think, hits on another theme in your book, which is my decision to pick up a new language of all things in adulthood was never something that I thought would happen. And, I took Hindi. Terrible at both of them. And so I was pretty hesitant to give a foreign language a go, especially in my 30s. This is so fascinating. Okay, I have a bunch of reactions.

So first of all, can we just pause to mark the moment when the world learned that there was something that Maya Shankar was not good at? Okay, Adam. That's because, I mean, I think everyone admires what a natural you are at so many things, you know, from your music virtuoso childhood to your mastery of cognitive science to your ability to have a conversation with anyone about anything and make their complex ideas understandable. I think it's reassuring to the rest of us that there are things that you too struggle with would be my first reaction. Secondly, I'm thinking about, I guess, the common arc of saying, well, I'm not a foreign language person. I lack this skill.

And then realizing that it was actually not skill that you lacked entirely. It sounds to me like you had a different kind of motivation in your 30s. 100%. You were, one, excited intrinsically to learn, which maybe you were less so in high school. And two, you also had a really strong pro-social purpose here, which is you're trying to connect with Jimmy's family. And I think that probably made the language learning a lot more meaningful. Yeah. The root of your motivation matters so much when it comes to learning. So when I was in high school, it was

like, okay, just got to get through that language requirement, try to get the A because I want to get into a good college, like blah, blah, blah, right? And then similarly in college, I think Hindi was just a way of checking the box on the foreign language requirement. And what happened with Mandarin, like you said, is it took on this hugely emotional quality to it, right? Which I wasn't expecting. And on top of feeling like I was going to be able to connect with Jimmy's relatives, what I didn't realize is that so much of culture is baked into language. And so when I was learning it, I was learning about this fundamental humility that exists within Chinese culture and like how much I love that.

And so it's really, it's been so charming to learn about those elements. And I would have ignored of what's the science of improving at improving? One of the things that holds a lot of us back is we're reluctant to put ourselves in uncomfortable situations. And nowhere is this more clear than learning a foreign language. If you look at why so many people struggle in high school to learn a language,

it's not necessarily that they lack the language gene or they miss the critical period. And if only they had learned it younger, they had an aptitude that's gone. It's that they're afraid to use it because you don't want to sound like an idiot. Absolutely. We don't want to embarrass ourselves. And that's totally reasonable. But the only way to learn to speak a language is to talk it out loud and to use it as you're acquiring it. Whereas most people expect that they can master it, that they can commit the

entire vocabulary and grammar to memory. And only then are they ready to speak it. I wonder if you were that person earlier. I was so anxious about speaking in a foreign language, especially Chinese, where you might say a tone with a slightly different inflection. And you've now said a completely different sentence because it's like ma versus ma. Right. Those mean totally different things. completely different sentence because it's like ma versus ma, right? Those mean totally different things. And yet I think what happened in the car that day and where I found the courage was he doesn't speak English. He's clearly feeling anxious. I'm clearly feeling anxious that I can't

communicate with him. And so then I like dig within myself. I have to like excavate courage. It's so deep inside of my body and I pull it out and I communicate with him. And I thought to myself, wow, talk about a emotional return on investment. Like I communicated with a human that I would not have been able to communicate with had it not been for the skill I'm building. And so sometimes it takes situations like that to allow yourself to engage with the thing you're not very good at before you achieve mastery. I literally could have written about you in chapter one of the book. You're embodying the very principle I was trying to unpack. And I feel like so much of learning requires us to put ourselves in uncomfortable situations because that's where

the challenge lies. Yes. But the fear of embarrassment, of feeling incompetent, of looking stupid holds us back. And so we end up making these tiny little adjustments instead of big leaps. Yeah, and I mean, discomfort carries the illusion that we're not making progress, right? And I mean, from a neuroscientific perspective, the best way to boost brain plasticity is to fail at things.

Because when you fail, those errors signal to the brain that something's wrong. In turn, it triggers the release of this beautiful cocktail of neurochemicals that help reshape the brain. It's only when you tell your nervous system, hey, buddy, current setup's not good enough, that it starts making the relevant changes, right? And so maybe we can channel some of that when we get frustrated. Exactly. Yeah, that's a great way to describe it. when we get frustrated. Exactly. Yeah, that's a great way to describe it.

Okay, let's now shift to the ingredients, to the toolkit for unlocking our potential. You talk about the importance of character, or what's otherwise known as soft skills. And can you please first share the origin story of the term soft skills? Because I absolutely loved it. And I feel like soft skills has gotten such a bad rep for so long, and I feel like you're redeeming it. So on behalf of all people who enjoy soft skills and enjoy cultivating them, thank you, sir. Yes, anytime. I think of character skills as learned capacities to put your principles into practice. You know, at some point I got curious about where the term came from. Like, why do we call these vital behavioral skills, why do we call them soft? That sounds weak. Well, if you trace the history, it turns out that the term originated from the

US Army when they were trying to classify different skills for soldiers and basically measure competencies to go and defend national security. And they had a list of hard skills, which were literally the capabilities to work with machines. Machines were made out of metal. That's hard. And so operating a tank or a gun was considered a hard skill.

And so then everything else, leadership, collaboration, was lumped in this soft skills bucket, which they didn't think was unimportant. They just meant like, you're not using a piece of almost unbreakable equipment. Yeah, exactly. So I think obviously that did a great disservice to this category of skills. And

I actually really wonder if, you know, if we had called those behavioral skills, if they had been called leadership skills, would they be branded differently today? The study that really blew my mind was a study that Raj Chetty led, where he found that we could predict your income in your 20s, how much money you make, from the number of years of experience your kindergarten teacher had. Wow. Unreal. I could not believe this when I read this research. And by the way, listeners, Raj Chetty is like a natural experiment genius. So he has controlled for all

of the relevant variables, I assure you. Anyway, continue. Yeah, he's a world-class economist and the finding is very robust. And the big question is, well, what are these experienced kindergarten teachers doing that sets kids up on a different trajectory? And my assumption was cognitive skills. They're giving you an edge in reading and math, and then you get to carry that with you. It is true that the more experienced teachers are better at teaching math and reading, but that advantage dissipates over the next few years and other kids catch up. Where kids get a lasting advantage from an experienced kindergarten teacher is in character skills. In fourth and eighth grade, the kids who happen to have a more

experienced kindergarten teacher randomly assigned ended up getting rated higher by their later teachers in being proactive, pro-social, disciplined, and determined. And those skills are almost two and a half times more important for predicting future success than cognitive skills. and a half times more important for predicting future success than cognitive skills. I'm wondering if we can explore some of the mechanisms by which character skills lead to better outcomes. So as I'm thinking about it now, it seems like, okay, determination, kind of a clear one. It means you're practicing maybe more deliberately, you're practicing harder, et cetera. It's also possible that when you build character skills, you're more likable. And so you're more likely to draw in mentors and peers and teachers and to attract the attention of employers. And so there

might be this virtuous cycle where character certainly is making you better at honing the craft, but having character skills makes other people in your orbit more likely to want to work with you and help make you better. I think that's right. I do wonder how much of growth is about character skills elevating your individual learning versus attracting people into your orbit who build the scaffolding to help you climb. So speaking of character skills, and I mean, you're just one of my favorite people to intellectually spar with, but we were chatting last week about the degree to which we think character skills are valuable. I tend to lean more nature versus nurture in that debate. And so, yeah, I guess my question here is, do we have encouraging evidence that adults can improve their character skills in a persistent and meaningful way?

And by the way, I would love for you to be right here. I want to be wrong because I really do want these skills to be malleable and mutable. And so I have no pride around my current point of view. Well, there's no one easier to persuade than somebody who's already invested in believing the case you're about to make. Well, no, honestly, I'm not here to make an argument.

I don't want to persuade you. What I want to do is share with you some of the evidence that's really shaped my thinking on this and see if you find it compelling. So let's start with the evidence in the book. I was quite taken with the experiment that Francisco Campos and colleagues did on entrepreneurs in West Africa. So you take in this experiment, you take 1,500 small business owners, you randomly assign them to a control group, a cognitive skills training group, or

a character skills training group. And the character skills training group sees their businesses grow almost three times as much over the next two years as the cognitive skills training group. Now, these founders are mostly in their 40s and 50s. So it's quite late to be learning character skills. Yeah, you're not in any kind of critical period, you know. No, I mean, they're not in kindergarten. Yeah, exactly. And the training program is not rocket science. It's a week of practicing being proactive and disciplined and determined. And then thinking about how those skills apply to your business. The fact that randomly assigning people to just practice honing those skills for a week at midlife, mid-career, then dramatically increases their revenue, looking at both sales

and profits. That, to me, is pretty persuasive. So tell me why that didn't persuade you or why it wasn't enough. Yeah, okay. So let me tell you what I think would persuade me just conceptually and bear with me. I'm thinking about this out loud. What I hear in the study you mentioned from Africa might be explained by the following. There are capacities that lay dormant in many of us, and we simply don't know that they're useful to recruit in any

given setting. And so what you've done in this intervention is you've simply made salient to these entrepreneurs that things like proactivity and determination, whatever the other soft skills are, are going to be helpful to them in their business pursuits. So it's less about them growing and seeing improvement in their character skills as much as knowing to access them in the first place. Fascinating. Fascinating. And because it's week long, I'm kind of like, that could be an alternative explanation. And that's still valuable, right? To alert people in certain disciplines that that matters.

Yeah. Okay. That's very interesting. Yeah. I find that totally plausible. I would still say that what's happening is they're activating a set of dormant capacities and turning them into useful skills. And so in that sense, they're still learning. I agree with that. But if, say, these things exist and they're dormant and you unlock them, over the course of a week, you might go from like zero to four in terms of like how much you know. And what I'm arguing is in the absence of a longitudinal study that shows that a person can go on the proactivity scale, for example, go from zero to 75,

I'm not certain about how much room for growth there is within that particular character trait. And so I'm unclear as to how, again, malleable it is. So we know they can unlock it in the first place. We know they can maybe inch a little forward over the course of the week. But how possible is it for two people pulled out of a random sample

to both get to 75 with the right tools? Yeah, that's a very good question. I think it's an empirical question that I have not seen a good answer to. After the break, the case for imperfectionism from a fellow recovering perfectionist. And we'll hear about a technique to unlock our hidden potential. It comes from a sea creature.

That's up next on A Slight Change of Plans. I want to start with your suggestion that we try and be more like a sponge and like a literal living sea sponge. We're not talking about like a kitchen dish sponge situation. So can you tell me a little bit more about this metaphor? And then I will tell you why I'm obsessed with it. So when I was interested in proactivity, I was interested in being proactive to absorb information that helps you grow. And we've known for a long time that this is an important driver of reaching potential. I was looking for insight about that. And people kept saying, as I talked to people who had achieved extraordinary growth or coached others to do the same, they kept saying, I was like a sponge. She was a sponge. He was a human sponge. And eventually it hit me that this might be more than, obviously. Any self-respecting social scientist has to take the sea sponge to do it. There's the sea sponge part of the textbook, right? Yeah. they also have finely tuned filters to expel harmful particles and i think why this resonated

with me is a lot of people think being a sponge is about just absorbing as much information as you can seek infinite amounts of feedback engage all of your critics like not so much not all critics are thinking critically not all critics are speaking constructively. And I think a huge part of being an effective sponge is being proactive, not just about what you take in, but also what you expel out. Yes. I mean, I love this concept about filtration because I think it's so crucial. And it's interesting. You talk in the book about the perils of having an ego-based filtration

system. So that's where you're pushing out a lot of the bad stuff that you hear, and you're just kind of absorbing all the like, oh, you're great, and the speech is great, and there's no room for improvement, right? I have the under-filtration problem that you described, and it's been a journey over time. So if I rewind the clock a bit, I mean, starting from the time that I was a little kid playing the violin, I was always someone who sought out an enormous amount of feedback. But the problem that I have is I've let too much feedback in and at times assigned equal importance to all of it than would have been helpful. And the way that I've rationalized this, that I've justified this is, okay, I'm a person with a lot of blind spots.

There's a lot of people out there who know a lot more than I do about any given thing. And I want to improve as much as possible. And I don't want to be prideful in these pursuits. But it's taken me a lot of time and a lot of confidence building to recognize what feedback better serves the thing I'm working on and what doesn't. What feedback better serves the thing I'm working on and what doesn't? And that's a really hard, it's really hard to fine tune this filtration system. Yeah, it's not easy. And I think probably, I would guess that most people are on one extreme or another on this.

Either they pay attention to all the criticism because they're so obsessed with learning and they think that's part of having a growth mindset or their egos are fragile and being insecure means that nothing gets in and they don't really learn from criticism. And I obviously want to find the sweet spot there. So I think for me, the key questions looking at the research on what makes for useful input are one expertise is this person credible in the domain two familiarity does this person know you and three care are they actually trying to help you get better yes yes and i think it's very common to have a critic who checks the first two boxes but not not the third, which means they don't necessarily have your best interest at heart. I think a good coach is not just attacking your worst self, but actually recognizing your hidden potential and trying to help you become a better

version of yourself. And I think to add to that, it's okay to not assign equal weight to every piece of feedback given to you by someone that you admire. So there's a difference between admiring a person and then accepting all of their feedback. And we shouldn't confuse the two. And like, I have a personal example with you on this topic, right? So you generously gave me a bunch of feedback on my TED Talk. You really helped elevate it. But crucially, I didn't accept all your feedback. And I remember thinking, wait a second, I'm rejecting Adam Grant's feedback. And this man literally holds the world record for like the most TED Talks given by like

any human. And but then I thought to myself, what would Adam tell me about whether or not to reject this feedback? And I heard you in my head. I heard you telling me on the phone, Maya, I'm just one person. It's one person's or not to reject this feedback. And I heard you in my head. I heard you telling me on the phone, Maya, I'm just one person. It's one person's feedback. Just reject this feedback.

If this doesn't apply to you or feel consonant with you and your personality type and the kind of TED Talk you want to give, who cares? Like, don't accept feedback just because it's someone's feedback. Accept it because it resonates with you. And that was growth for me because I think back in the day, like 10 years ago, I would have been like, accept it all, resonates with you. And that was growth for me because I think back in the day,

like 10 years ago, I would have been like, accept it all. No filtration process. But I appreciate you being that voice in my head along the way. Well, I'm sorry that I didn't say it more explicitly right off the bat. If you get a comment just from one person, that may just be their idiosyncratic taste or their subjective reaction. And you don't have to pay attention to it just because someone that you like or respect said it. And I don't want to rid myself of this trait altogether because I really do value my open mind. And I think it makes me a better person overall. It's just that I see that there are some downsides. I agree.

And I think this would be an example of what psychologists would call a strength overused. Oh, that's really nice. Yeah. So you don't want to eliminate the strength. You want to make sure you're not using it excessively or misusing it by applying it in the wrong situations. Yes, exactly. But, you know, I also think from a developmental perspective is really natural and healthy when we're young to allow in a bunch of feedback and to test it out because we're still figuring out who we are, like what we care about, what we value, what we prize when it comes to giving a talk or writing a song or whatever it is. And it is

through the process of receiving feedback and seeing how we respond that we sometimes even learn what our preferences are in the first place, right? And what we care about. And what's so interesting in my own evolution is that I assumed with age that this would become easier, right? Filtering would become easier. And it absolutely has overall. But I do feel like when I enter a new domain, so podcasting, for example, or giving my first TED talk, I go back into that developmental stage of mind where I open the floodgates and I let all this feedback in. And I again have to fine tune those filtration skills to figure out, you know, where I want to go. So it can be a process, right? Yeah. I think it's better to err on the side of being too open than too close because it's much easier to turn on the filter than it is to suddenly absorb information that you don't have access to anymore because people have learned that you're not receptive to it. And I love the research showing that we're better off

asking for advice than feedback. Yeah. Tell me more about that. Because when I read that in the book, I was like, aren't they kind of the same thing? So when you ask for feedback, the other person rewinds to the past and tells you what you did wrong or what you did right. And that can lead you to ruminate about all of your mistakes. And then it's really hard to carry that forward to what am I going to do differently tomorrow? It can also, if it's positive feedback, it can lead you to say, all right, I'm good. I don't need to change anything. And when you ask for advice, people actually look ahead and they say, well, here's the thing I might adjust next time.

And then you can immediately think about, okay, next time I'm in this situation, what do I wanna try? And that's less threatening. You're not defensive. You don't have to claim that you actually were perfect last time. It's a little bit more optimistic because you have an opportunity to improve it. So I've actually stopped asking for feedback.

I used to do every talk, I would get off stage and say, what feedback do you have? Now I say, what's the one thing I can do better? Yeah. So on the topic of coaches, how is it that we find good coaches and mentors? And there's a somewhat counterintuitive finding in your book that I'd love you to talk about when it comes to searching for these people. Yeah. I think what most of us assume is that you want to learn from the best. So find the most accomplished musician, the greatest athlete, the genius scientist,

whatever your field is, you want to learn from the expert. The empirical evidence does not support that as the best idea. My favorite demonstration being that if you take an intro class with an adjunct professor or a lecturer, as opposed to somebody who's tenured or tenure track in that field, you actually go on to get better grades in your next class in that subject. In other words, the person with less expertise is a better teacher. Why would that be? I think there's evidence for a couple of mechanisms. One is that sometimes experts are too far from where you are to actually remember what it's like to be

in your shoes. So they can't teach the basics. Einstein was an awful intro physics teacher. The second challenge is that the process of gaining expertise can make people worse at communicating what they know. So it's not just that they forgot, it's that they've been doing a lot of it on autopilot and they tend to take much of the knowledge they have for granted. I think oftentimes the best mentor is somebody who's just a couple of steps ahead of you. And maybe not somebody who was a natural, but somebody who struggled because they actually had to study how to improve. And I guess that has led me to say, instead of those who can't do teach, we should say those who can do often can't in the world. And I will say that Perlman had a very unusual way of teaching that led to really great outcomes. And this is what he did. So I would be playing some passage

and rather than being prescriptive about what to do and like how I could play it better, he would interrogate me with a litany of questions around how it is that I thought I could make the passage better. So it was sort of like a, Maya, you're clearly unhappy with the way that that phrase is being shaped. What do you think you can do about it? And at the time, Adam, I remember being like, dude, you're the freaking expert. Why are you asking me? Right? My like 13-year-old brain didn't really understand the power, the gift that he was giving me. But what he was training me to do was to be a

critical thinker. I don't want to be a lobbyist for the world experts. They don't actually need our help right now. They're doing just fine. But I want to argue that there's the potential for them to be great teachers too. I think they have hidden potential. So many teachers and mentors think that they're supposed to be Yoda and they're just going to unfold their wisdom for you. And the reality is that people are much better positioned to learn if you guide them to come up with their own answers as opposed to just spoon feeding them your answers. It sounds like what it's like Pro Men was doing for you was activating the tutor effect and the coach effect.

So the tutor effect is the finding that the best way to learn something is often to teach it. That when you have to, in this case, sort of teach yourself and say, well, here's what I didn't like about this violin performance, that leads you to understand it better because you have to explain it. It leads you to remember it better because you have to retrieve it. And then in the process of coaching, normally it would be coaching someone else, but in this case, coaching yourself out loud, you actually discover that you have some of the knowledge you already need. And that builds your confidence and your motivation.

It's better to be uncomfortable today and better tomorrow than it is to avoid discomfort today and stagnate tomorrow. Yeah. Okay. There are limits though, right? To our desire to get better. Talk about imperfectionism and how that can be an asset to us when it comes to unlocking our hidden potential. Yeah. So this is, for me, being an imperfectionist is about, it's not about lowering your standards at all. It's about learning to accept the right

imperfections that are not essential to the excellence you're trying to achieve or that are necessary for growth. So I'll give you my diving example, because this is where I first learned that this is a skill. And to be clear, I'm still in recovery from perfectionism. Yeah, we're both recovering perfectionists. Big time, big time. But I think in diving, I always was trying to aim for a perfect 10. And one day my coach, Eric Best, sat me down and said, you know, there's no such thing as a perfect 10. It's a misnomer. In one rulebook, a 10 is for excellence. In the other, it's very good. And all of a sudden, I realized that the time I was spending trying to perfect my dives was actually limiting my growth.

In fact, I've come to believe that if perfectionism were medication, it would come with a warning label that says, warning, may cause stunted growth. You just got yourself a job at the FDA, Adam. Nice job. I mean, maybe. But what I lived was exactly what the research shows, which is you only work on the things you know you can do well. Yeah. If you're trying to be perfect, you avoid anything where you might fail.

You end up missing the forest and the trees and trying to tinker with these tiny details instead of looking at the big picture. And you ruminate a lot and beat yourself up. And I guess the way that I've tried to put that into practice is I try to calibrate. I have a range of different priorities in my life. And when I write a book, I'm aiming for a nine because it's a huge investment of time. And I hope there'll be a decent number of people who read it and benefit from it. But I don't treat everything that way. I'm very content with a seven when I give a speech, knowing that each audience is a little different, and each performance is going to be a little different. And good enough is actually good enough in that situation.

And I think this is something we could all do is to pause to ask, like, how high are the stakes here? Yeah. And we aim obviously higher when it's more important. And we give ourselves a little bit more grace and permission to be imperfect on things that are less consequential. And look, no matter how good you get, there are always going to be people who don't like what you do.

And there are always going to be aspects of your performance that are going to fall short of someone's standards. You cannot please everyone. So you might as well decide who you're willing to disappoint. Can you just say that one more time? I need to hear that one more time. Maya Shankar, you in particular, you as a human cannot please everyone and neither can I, and neither can anyone. Okay. It's therapy right there. So you might as well decide who you're willing to disappoint and which standards are important to you. Yeah. And I'm thinking about all the domains where this imperfectionism, perfectionist mindset is

relevant. And I'm thinking about all those parents out there that just berate themselves every day because they don't think they're the perfect parents. And it's like, well, what if a nine is every day my kids knew I loved them? Like, what if that was a nine? Like, maybe that is good enough slash perfection in the domain of parenting versus, oh, I, you know, coach them through the remote. I mean, it's just so, it's just a huge manual now, right, for how it is that we should raise our kids. But yeah, it's just making me think about how we define our North Star. Yeah. At first, I was really reluctant to apply this to parenting. I don't want parents to be scored. Your parenting today was a three and a half. But you just changed my mind because there's no reason why we can't clarify.

First of all, you should not expect to be a perfect parent. No one will ever achieve that standard. It's impossible. Every parent makes mistakes. And I think that's part of how we grow as parents. I think some of my best moments of growth as a parent actually have come when I've been really disappointed in myself for getting frustrated and impatient with our kids. But I don't think a lot of parents, I think this is a big aha moment for me. I don't think a lot of

parents have sat down to say, okay, I want to be a nine parent, not a 10 parent, because that's going to be healthier for me and for my kid. What does the nine look like? What are the behaviors that really matter? And what are the ones that are okay to be imperfect on? I think that's a great discussion that we could all have with our families. I'm going to force myself to have it this weekend. Yeah. I think the most hopeful message coming out of your book, and I love that you devote a sizable chunk of the book to this topic, is how we can help unlock potential in others. It is a very other-focused orientation, which I think is just going to make humanity better across the board, because you don't always see that represented in

psych books. And so can you just leave us with some reflections on how we can help unlock potential in those around us? This is my top pick for kicking myself that I didn't write this into the book. Like, how did this not make the cut? I don't know. All right. So a group of my colleagues led by Laura Morgan Roberts created an exercise called the reflected best self portrait. And the idea is that a lot of people have hidden potential that's invisible to them. It's almost like the opposite of a blind spot that you're not aware of some of your own strengths. And so you need other people to hold up a mirror to help you identify the things that you're good at, that maybe these are underutilized strengths as opposed to the

overused ones that we talked about earlier. So the exercise, I've had students and leaders do it for about 15 years now. And people often come back and say, this was a life-changing experience. So all you do is you reach out to some people who know you well in different walks of life. You could do this with family, some friends, some colleagues, and you ask them to tell a story about you at a time when you are at your best. And then you collect all the stories, which is the most delightful set of emails you will ever get. And then your job is to recognize the patterns and compose a self-portrait of who you are at your best. And very often when people do this,

they're like, oh, I didn't even know that was a strength of mine. And now I see all these places I can use it. I also felt like this is a gift you can give to other people to help them see their hidden potential. So when I first learned about this exercise, I think it was, gosh, it must've been 20 years ago. I remember the winter break starting and I was a first year grad student. I had nothing on my calendar. I was broke. What am I going to do with this week? I decided that I was going to invert the exercise and I picked a bunch of people who mattered to me and I wrote them all a story about a time when they were at their best and just emailed it to them out of the blue. It is one of the most meaningful weeks I have ever spent, even though I was just sitting in a room writing emails,

because really thinking about, well, what is other people's hidden potential? Because really thinking about, well, what is other people's hidden potential and how can I make that more visible to them felt like a really meaningful act of friendship or, you know, an investment in a relationship. And people seem to really appreciate it. I love that example. That's something that everyone listening can actually do right now. I mean, just even pick one person and tell them who they are at their best. So I remember when I flew to China after Jimmy and I got married and we had this big wedding reception and I was so jet lagged, first of all, and I was in extremely elementary Chinese land. I'm still in elementary Chinese land. But I remember my in-laws kind of looked at me and they're like, so aren't you going to say

something? And then on the spot, I had to come up with this like wedding speech. And it was so, it was so basic, Adam. I was like, hello, I am Maya. I married Jimmy. Thank you so much for being here. You know, really poetic, like so much emotional resonance, I'm sure. This is great. You're like, C-spot, C-spot, run. Exactly. I'm like, I currently am in China.

You are all currently here as well.